Hi @Luke Reade / @Luke Reade, have you seen this recent resource from USAID on designing vulnerability assessments, it may be of use to you. Your question comes at an interesting time as we have just responded to a call from South Africa's national government, supported by GIZ, for proposals to develop a national framework for assessing climate risk and vulnerability, also with a sectoral focus. Some of our sub-national governments have already attempted climate vulnerability assessments (usually undertaken by consultants with varying levels of expertise and resulting quality), as I'm sure others have in Australia. It would be interesting to try and harvest some lessons from those existing efforts, most of which have battled with the data-scarcity you mentioned and also with doing justice to the socio-economic dimensions, let alone the cultural, organizational and governance dimensions, of vulnerability.
I am not convinced that the sectoral scale is the right one to be assessing social vulnerability. I think a sub-regional / local spatial scale, like a catchment, municipal or a (sub)urban area for example, is probably a more meaningful scale at which to assess social vulnerability in order to target adaptation interventions. The agricultural sector might be an exception, but I don't know enough about that. I also think looking beyond the exposure side of vulnerability to pay closer attention to the adapitve capacity part of the equation is useful, particularly at the organizational scale. The CaDD tool seems to hold some promise in this regard.
Two other references you might dig into are:
Hi All
I'm looking for tools to undertake sector based social vulnerability assessments and planning to integrate into the state governments (Queensland Australia) sector adaptation plans. Sectors covered are agriculture, built environment and infrastructure, tourism, biodiversity and ecology, industry, small business, health and wellbeing and emergency management:
https://www.qld.gov.au/environment/climate/climate-change/adapting/sectors-systems
In particular I'm looking for tools to use in an environment where there are minimal data sets established for social vulnerability and climate change (e.g no equivalent to Climate Just (UK) and the Social Vulnerability Index). I'd also be interested in monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and governance and accountability tools and frameworks for such a sector-based approach to adaptation.
I'd also be interested to hear peoples thoughts on having a state/regional/national-wide adaptation approach, that may facilitate community-level plans, projects etc, instead of a sector-based approach? Currently, transport and water are missing from the sector approach. Remote and indigenous communites are also not engaging in this process, suggesting it's not an appropriate framework for self determination and inclusion.
Luke