In the first year's work, we developed the framework of climate change vulnerability assessment tool. The purpose of the second year's study is to compute the composite index of climate change of health impacts by sigungu (municipal) area level. We analysis the health impacts into five categories; vector-borne diseases, food and water-borne diseases, disaster, heat stress, and air pollution/allergy.
The vulnerability assessment framework of climate change focused on health impacts consists of six layers, The first layer is climate factors such as the future change of temperature, precipitation, and humidity and their variabilities. The second layer is the magnitude and distribution of climate change related to diseases. The third one is environmental factors, which are composed of natural environment and man-made environment. The fourth layer is vulnerable population distribution of climate change. The fifth layer describes social conditions, which are associated with social resources and upstream determinants of health. The final layer of vulnerability model is the health system. In particular, public health initiatives are crucial to the success ofadaptation policy and community mobilizing.
In the first part of the study, we select 72 the variables (indicators) mainly based on the vulnerability assessment framework of climate change we developed and data availability. Each health impact has a different set of sub-indicators. The second part of the study is to compute the composite index using indicators we select in the first part. We throughly review related documents and follow the compositor's construction process suggested. We stress the need for multi-variate analysis prior to the aggregation of the individual indicators. We deal with the problem of missing data and with the techniques used to bring into a common unit the indicators that are if very different nature. We explore different methodologies for weighting and aggregating indicators into a composite and test the robustness of the composite.
The study finds that the composite shows not only the relative vulnerability of climate change, but also customized adaptation strategies for immediate actions. Even the same composite index, some regions need to develop new environmental policies or take care vulnerable population at first, the others need to improve the social capitals and rearrange resource distribution of policy basis and institution.
The assessment of regional vulnerability for climate change is useful tool to measure the effectiveness of adaptation efforts and evaluate the exposure sensitivity of climate risks. The composite index we develop provides the information regarding the factors for susceptible parts, the comparison of relative vulnerability, which helps people to understand the risks and induce people actions.