Livelihood Vulnerability Index

Both use the same standardized indicators and weighting logic, but they organize and report them differently. The basic LVI groups indicators into thematic major components — socio-demographics, livelihoods, social networks, health, food, water, and disaster exposure — and averages them into one overall score. The LVI-IPCC instead regroups those major components into the IPCC's three contributing factors, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, and combines them so vulnerability rises with exposure and sensitivity and falls with adaptive capacity. Hahn and colleagues offer both so users can choose a transparent thematic view or one aligned with climate-science vocabulary.

The indicators are measured in incompatible units — distances, percentages, counts, scores — so they cannot be averaged directly. Hahn, Riederer and Foster rescale each to a zero-to-one range using its minimum and maximum in the data, the same logic used by the Human Development Index, ensuring every indicator contributes on a common scale where higher consistently means more vulnerable. A consequence is that scores are relative to the sampled range, which makes the index excellent for comparing communities within one study but not directly comparable across studies with different ranges.

Within a sub-component, indicators are averaged equally. When sub-components are combined into major components and major components into the overall index, Hahn and colleagues weight each by the number of sub-components it contains, so a major component composed of many indicators carries proportionally more weight and none is unduly diluted. This balanced-weighting choice is deliberately simple and transparent rather than derived from a statistical or expert-elicited weighting scheme, which is part of the method's pragmatic appeal but also one of its main contestable assumptions.