# **1. Introduction**

<mark>It is well-understood that poor people in the poorest countries are the most vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic climate change (World Development Report, 2009; Stern, 2006). The poor are adversely impacted by climate change because they live in heavily impacted countries and locations within those countries; depend on natural resource-based livelihoods that are disproportionately affected by climate change; and have the weakest ability to adapt to the impacts. Yet while there have been important conceptual advances in the understanding of vulnerability and adaptation, quantitative estimates of how vulnerability varies across countries, regions, and sectors are only starting to emerge.</mark> <mark>This paper develops a methodology for regional disaggregated estimation and mapping of the areas that are ex-ante the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and applies it to Tajikistan, a mountainous country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A geographically disaggregated picture of vulnerability to climate change is helpful for planning adaptation strategies in the same manner that a poverty map is helpful for designing anti-poverty policies and programs (Hentschel, Lanjouw, Lanjouw, and Poggi; 2000). The methodology presented here may prove a useful tool for</mark> policy analysts interested in how to ensure pro-poor adaptation in developing countries.

<mark>Adaptation matters: when category 3 cyclone Bhola hit East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh) in 1970, upwards of 500,000 people died. When in 1991 a category 4 cyclone hit Bangladesh, mortality was 138,000. In November 2007, cyclone Sidr, also of category 4, resulted in only 5-10,000 deaths. Bangladesh achieved this remarkable reduction in disaster mortality through a combination of early warning systems and cyclone shelters. Early warning systems spanned both high tech information systems and low tech outreach such as volunteers on bikes that spread warning messages. What this example shows is that the effectiveness of societies’ adaptive capacity is paramount for how climate events translate into human and economic consequences (Heltberg, Siegel, Jorgensen, 2009). Another stark example is the impact of earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. While more than 200,000 people died in Haiti's 7.0 earthquake in January, 2010 from collapsed buildings, an 8.0 earthquake in Chile in February 2010 resulted in 486 deaths, many from tsunami waves. There is a saying among engineers that buildings, not earthquakes, kill people. Likewise, adaptation and maladaptation determine vulnerability to climate change and that is why adaptation planning needs to consider social dimensions and concede a greater role for social protection mechanisms</mark> (Heltberg, 2007; Heltberg, Siegel and Jorgensen, 2010).

<mark>We present what is, to our knowledge, the first regionally disaggregated map of climate vulnerability with national coverage in the literature. Our vulnerability index is also innovative in that it takes adaptive capacity explicitly into account. The vulnerability index we estimate addresses the question: if policy makers wish to direct funding toward the areas with the highest vulnerability to climate change, where should that funding go? And what are the factors that render some areas more vulnerable than</mark> <mark>2</mark>