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This publication covers the main findings and discussions from the second UNU-EHS Expert Working Group (EWG II) meeting on Measuring Vulnerability. It provides an overview of concepts, methods, and debates. Discussion of the term vulnerability and its meaning from social, economic, environmental and institutional points of view was a major part of the scientific debate.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens,“this is the best of times and the worse of times” for interdisciplinary, policy relevant research on vulnerability. On the one hand, the term “vulnerability” appears frequently in applied research on areas as diverse as development and poverty studies (academically in anthropology and sociology), public health, climate studies, engineering, geography, political ecology, and, of course, among disaster researchers. The bad news is that researchers from such diverse backgrounds seldom sit together and share working definitions of “vulnerability,” what methods they use to measure or assess it, and their successes and failures in communicating their research to decision makers. Such diverse researchers come from very different backgrounds and field experiences. They may hold different assumptions about fundamental things like the nature of science and what constitutes an explanation. While these differences can–as in the case of this EWG II meeting–lead to creative tensions and new insights, the resulting debate might appear to outsiders–especially practical people in decision making positions–to be, at best, a wasteful circus of ideas or, at worst, an unruly bar room brawl. The gentle reader should be reassured that the meeting reported …