Compare methods

	Climate Vulnerability Index	Livelihood Vulnerability Index
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	2003	2009
Originator	Susan L. Cutter (social vulnerability); IPCC framing via Smit & Wandel	Micah B. Hahn, Anne M. Riederer & Stanley O. Foster
Type	Composite index aggregating exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity	Composite indicator of household climate vulnerability
Seminal source	Cutter, S. L., Boruff, B. J., & Shirley, W. L. (2003). Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards. Social Science Quarterly, 84(2), 242-261.	Hahn, M. B., Riederer, A. M., & Foster, S. O. (2009). The Livelihood Vulnerability Index: A pragmatic approach to assessing risks from climate variability and change-A case study in Mozambique. Global Environmental Change, 19(1), 74-88.
Aliases	Composite Climate Vulnerability Index, Climate Risk and Vulnerability Index, IPCC Vulnerability Composite, Social Vulnerability to Climate Index	LVI, Hahn Livelihood Vulnerability Index, LVI-IPCC, Composite Livelihood Vulnerability Assessment
Related	4	3
Summary	A climate vulnerability index is a composite indicator that combines measures of exposure to climate hazards, sensitivity to those hazards, and adaptive capacity into a single comparable score for places or populations. The conceptual backbone is the IPCC framing, articulated clearly by Smit and Wandel, in which vulnerability rises with exposure and sensitivity and falls with the capacity to adapt. The measurement machinery owes much to Susan Cutter's Social Vulnerability Index, which showed how to select, normalize, and statistically reduce many socioeconomic variables into a defensible index of who is most at risk. A climate vulnerability index merges these traditions: it assembles biophysical exposure indicators with social sensitivity and adaptive-capacity indicators, puts them on a common scale, and aggregates them. The output ranks counties, communities, or households so that scarce adaptation resources can be targeted. Because it is a composite, every step, indicator choice, normalization, weighting, embeds judgments that must be made transparent.	The Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) is a composite-indicator method for assessing the vulnerability of households and communities to climate variability and change, developed by Micah Hahn, Anne Riederer and Stanley Foster in a 2009 case study in Mozambique. It is built from household survey data organized into major components — typically socio-demographic profile, livelihood strategies, social networks, health, food, water, and exposure to natural disasters and climate variability — each composed of standardized sub-indicators. These are normalized to a common scale, averaged into sub-components and weighted major components, and aggregated into an overall index. A companion formulation, the LVI-IPCC, reorganizes the same indicators into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's contributing factors of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, offering a pragmatic, data-driven way to compare vulnerability across places and to target adaptation.