[Coral-List] new tool to assess social vulnerability to climate change

[Christy Loper]

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new tool for assessing 
social vulnerability to climate change.  The new guidelines, "Indicators 
to assess community-level social vulnerability to climate change" are 
now available for download at www.socmon.org <http://www.socmon.org> (or 
use the following link: http://www.socmon.org/download.ashx?docid=64614 
).  We wish to emphasize that this represents a first draft for public 
circulation and field testing and look forward to receiving suggestions 
for improvement from our partners in the field.

The purpose of this document is to provide a minimum set of 
socioeconomic indicators related to climate change. These can be 
included in a socioeconomic assessment of any site for which climate 
change impacts are an important issue. The resulting information can 
then inform coastal management needs and adaptive management. This 
document meant to serve as an addendum to regional socioeconomic 
monitoring guidelines produced by the Global Socioeconomic Monitoring 
Initiative for Coastal Management (SocMon) and its Pacific counterpart, 
SEM-Pasifika, which aim to improve site management of coastal and marine 
areas by providing simple, user-friendly guidelines on how to conduct a 
socioeconomic assessment.   Such assessments help coastal managers 
incorporate community views into adaptive management of marine resources.

  Funding for this publication was provided by the Secretariat for the 
Pacific Environment Programme (SPREP) through the Coral Reef InitiativeS 
for the Pacific (CRISP) and IUCN.  In-kind support was provided by The 
Nature Conservancy and the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program.


best,
Supin Wongbusarakum, TNC and Christy Loper, NOAA

-- 
Christy Loper, Ph.D.
Coral Reef Conservation Program
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

1305 East West Highway
Silver Spring, MD 20910
1-301-713-3155 x155
christy.loper at noaa.gov