The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/African and Latin American Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC) Project conducted the Dominican Republic Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment from December 2012 to May 2013. The assessment seeks to improve understanding of climate change impacts on watersheds and coastal resources, and the people dependent on them, in four climate-sensitive targeted hotspots. Its organizational structure follows the major components of the widely accepted proposition that vulnerability is a function of three things: exposure to a stress (in this case climatic); the sensitivity of a community, livelihood, or natural system to that stress; and their adaptive capacity to recover from the impacts of that exposure. The most vulnerable communities/households are those with high exposure, high sensitivity, and low adaptive capacity. To assess these factors, climate, watershed, marine and coastal resources, and institutional analyses were conducted in the targeted hotspots.
Last updated: March 06, 2014