The hazards of indicators: Insights from the environmental vulnerability index

Abstract

Since the early 1990s a number of projects have developed indexes to measure vulnerability to environmental change. This article investigates the key conceptual and methodological problems associated with such indexes. It examines in detail an index that explicitly addresses environmental change as an issue of vulnerability, the Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) developed by the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC). This examination offers some broader lessons for indicator-based projects, all of which require a simple model of complex and uncertain social-ecological systems, and entail difficult choices about the selection, standardization, weighting, and aggregation of..