Assessing and Mapping Climate Change Vulnerability with the Help of GIS: Example of Burundi. GI_Forum 2014 – Geospatial Innovation for Society|

Abstract

Vulnerability assessments are important instruments to reveal the most harmful impacts of climate change on the environment and society. They are applied by development agencies to identify hotspot regions of climate change and to formulate appropriate adaptation measures. In this context, our work contributes to standardise the approach of vulnerability assessments, and to stress the need of geographic information systems as key instruments in order to include spatial analysis and vulnerability mapping in the assessment and visualisation of outputs. Preliminary results from a vulnerability assessment carried out for Burundi show the possibilities of such an approach, but also illustrate the constraints, which lie mainly in the evaluation of impacts and the reliability and heterogeneity of datasets.