The Challenge of Measuring and Operationalizing Vulnerabilities

Since the 1990s, synthetic indices of vulnerability have emerged as the main diagnostic and mapping tool to prevent crises and reduce the consequences of disasters, ensuring a global view that facilitates international comparisons. This chapter discusses various approaches, including deductive, inductive, hierarchical or relative approaches, for estimating or measuring vulnerability. An important step in the operationalization of vulnerability, in the development of analytical tools and in the production of indicators and maps, is to examine the meaning of the constraints, gaps and omissions in the information mobilized. Estimation and mapping tools tend to focus on a snapshot, without considering that in the course of a crisis, the most vulnerable individuals, groups and territories are not always the same. Estimation tools tend to mobilize the same set of vulnerability indicators, transposing them from one territory to another without taking into account the diversity of territories or scale effects.