This document provides an overview of the PGDD512 module on Resilience and Vulnerability. It includes administrative information like online platforms used, contact information for the lecturer, and assessment details. The module aims to help students critically analyze and apply concepts of vulnerability and resilience. Key topics covered include the conceptualization of vulnerability and resilience, social-ecological systems and exposure, indicators of vulnerability and resilience, resilience building and adaptation, disaster risk assessment, food security, urban disaster risks, and gender in disaster risk reduction. Students are expected to develop an understanding of the analytical frameworks and differing traditions used to study vulnerability and resilience, and how the concepts are related.

1. PGDD512
RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY

2. ADMINISTRATIVE
• eFundi?
• Penzu?
• ACDS user account
• Office hours - please make
appointment with Suna
Meyer (
suna.meyer@nwu.ac.za)
• SASDiR.org

3. STUDY MATERIAL
• Study guide (read GUIDE!…and read READ!)
• No prescribed book
• LOTS of prescribed reading!
• Style: Peer/cooperative/self learning

4. EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT
• Participation mark = 25%
• Assignments = 25%
• Examination = 50%
• Sub minimum = 40%

5. MODULE
OUTCOMES
• Critically judge vulnerability
and resilience.
• Apply various models.
• Monitor and communicate
vulnerability and exposure.
• Communicate V&R to
diverse audience.

6. UNITS
• Unit 1: Conceptualisation
• Unit 2: SES and exposure
• Unit 3: V&R indicators
• Unit 4: Resilience building and
adaptation
• Unit 5: Disaster risk assessment
• Unit 6: Food security and
sustainable livelihoods
• Unit 7: Urban disaster risks.
• Unit 8: EWS
• Unit 9: Gender and DRR

7. RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY
CONCEPTUALISATION

8. ANALYTICAL
FRAMEWORK
Theory
Methodology
Practice

9. What is vulnerability?

10. VULNERABILITY
• Core concept in disaster risk, climate change and food
security.
• Related to aspects of exposure and sensitivity.

11. VULNERABILITY
Inability of individuals or communities to anticipate,
change, cope with, and adapt to certain social,
economic, political and physical created factors which
are/could be exploited by natural and anthropogenic
hazards.

12. What is resilience?

13. RESILIENCE
“The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise
while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same
function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity, that is,
the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity”

14. DIFFERENT TRADITIONS
DIFFERENT EMPHASIS
• Natural science - positivist
• Social science - constructivist

15. DISCIPLINARY ORIGINS
• Epistemology (what is
knowledge?)
• Resilience —> SES
• Vulnerability —> multiple
disciplines (hazard science,
human ecology,
development studies,
political economy)

16. Question remains:
Resilient or Vulnerable to WHAT?

17. Is resilience and vulnerability opposites?

18. HOW DOES SYSTEMS RESPOND TO
CHANGE?

19. Resilience as another dimension
of vulnerability
- following exposure and
sensitivity

20. We need to find a convergence of the terms…

21. PERSONAL JOURNAL
• Create a journal entry and share only with your
lecturers
• dewaldvn@acds.co.za,
• By Monday morning (10 Feb 2014).
• AFTER doing your reading reflect on the terms
resilience and vulnerability.
• What is their essence and where do they converge?