## 2 Conceptual Framework
### Adaptive Capacity Index  
Adaptive capacity, which is a component of resilience development, refers to the ability to shift and capitalize on opportunities or cope with the repercussions of climate change. Adaptive capacity is often context-specific and depends on the availability of resources and the capacity to learn, as well as governance measures. Often, adaptive capacity must be translated into actions, without which vulnerability will be enhanced [29]. The adaptive capacity index indicates therefore the inherent characteristics of a system that allow it to adjust. In addition, adaptive capacity can be framed as, \"the ability of systems, institutions, humans, and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to consequences' (e.g., knowledge to introduce new farming methods)\" [30]. In the context of this current work, this refers to a production system's (wheat, barley, and maize) capacity to adapt to and deal with a variety of stresses and shocks, such as climate change, climate variability, and extreme occurrences [31; 35; 36; 39]. In this work, the adaptive capacity of farmers to produce crops to manage droughs regularly reduces the severity of drought effects on agricultural production [21]. The effect of the adaptive capacity index on the exposure, sensitivity, and vulnerability indexes are determined through proxies such as literacy and poverty rates. Poverty and literacy rates were chosen as the primary socioeconomic proxies because they fully contain and influence all other variables. For instance, poverty alleviation might result in increased literacy rates, and the ramifications of this might be shown in improved social networks, connections, safety nets, enhanced transportation and route networks, greater property ownership, and more discretionary income, as well as the capacity to irrigate rivers and streams [20; 39]. All these sub-indices (sensitivity, exposure, and adaptive capacity) combine to form the vulnerability index (Figure 1).  
As seen above, the vulnerability sourcebook presents two perspectives of vulnerability based on the AR4 and AR5. The AR4 perspective frames vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, while the more recent AR5 frames vulnerability as a function of hazard exposure and adaptive capacity. In the current work, we adopt the AR4 definition of vulnerability for our methodology based on the following reasons: (1) It involves a broader perspective of vulnerability that already encompasses three elements of the AR5 perspective (exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity); (2) the different components of vulnerability introduced here have specific contributions towards the climate-agriculture and socio-economic proxies (exposure reflecting the effects of climate forcing, sensitivity representing yield changes, and adaptive capacity reflecting the ability to cope through specific proxies), which all correspond to the precipitation, yield and adaptive capacity data; (3) the equation which states that vulnerability is a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity has recently been cited by several studies [20; 21; 40] and used to frame vulnerability; and finally (4), this work aims at incorporating the hazard element of vulnerability into exposure, which is also a reflection of the effects of climate on vulnerability. This is important because including a separate variable for hazards might lead to double counting, since exposure already covers that dimension.