Climate Vulnerability Assessment

Lecture 06 of 8

Ground-truthing a desk assessment

Why a desk-based vulnerability assessment has to be checked against a site visit, and how to run one that a small team can complete in days, not months.

Reading lecture40 minWritten questions to do

In this lecture

  • Design a short field verification
  • Spot where desk data and reality diverge
  • Record findings that can update the index

Desk data is a hypothesis

A composite index built entirely from national datasets is a hypothesis about a place, not a description of it. A short field visit - a walk-through, a handful of household conversations, a look at what has already flooded - is what turns the hypothesis into an assessment somebody can act on.

Two days, one ward, real answers

A verification visit does not need to be exhaustive to be useful. A structured half-day per ward, checking the two or three indicators the desk data was least confident about, catches most of the divergence a full re-survey would find at a fraction of the cost.

Materials

Yours to keep, and usable away from the platform.

  • Field verification checklistWorksheet · 78 KB
  • Ward visit recording sheetWorksheet · 64 KB

Design prototype - the attachments are placeholders and nothing downloads yet.

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