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exceeded and they could suffer serious consequences. These consequences are also influenced by Module
overall ecosystem health and, very likely, in areas with degraded ecosystems they are also less able
to provide a buffer for the communities against flooding. The concept of resilience has been used
to characterize a system’s ability to bounce back to a reference state after a disturbance, and the
capacity of a system to maintain certain structures and functions despite disturbance. If the resilience

is exceeded, collapse can occur (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; J?ger and Kok, 2008; UNEP 2009).
Therefore, the focus of the vulnerability reduction efforts should be on helping to increase resilience
both for people and ecosystems, instead of only reacting to actual impacts.

3.3 Defining the scope of the assessment Abu Dhabi, UAE

In principle, you can carry out an IEA assessment that includes vulnerability and climate change impact
assessments for any given issue, geographic area or level of decision-making. In practice however,
there usually are two choices: analysis based on jurisdictional (political) boundaries, or on non-political
boundaries (e.g., ecoregion, watershed). Using either approach has advantages and disadvantages; only
rarely do the two spatial boundaries coincide, as they do, for example, in small island states. In practice,
assessments are often focused on a country, but even in this case, there is a need to analyze specific

issues on the level of ecological units (e.g., ecosystems, watershed, airsheds), usually both in sub-national
and transboundary contexts.

In a more traditional approach, the analysis is organized around environmental themes (e.g., water,
air). From the perspective of policy, however, environmental problems under different themes often
intersect with the same set of socio-economic processes or policies. Development of the transportation

infrastructure, for instance, has implications for land cover, water quality and biodiversity. Such impacts
would appear fragmented if the analysis were structured around environmental themes. So, from one
point of view, analyzing environmental implications of the sector would be more practical/strategic.

However, using a sectoral approach, for example, transport, energy, agriculture, may result in fragmenting
the environmental picture. Pressures on water quality, for example, may need to be addressed under

agriculture, energy and municipal water supply.

Although we have presented sectoral and thematic approaches as two distinctly different alternatives
in this module, there are ways to combine the two, depending on the environmental problems and
information needs of your country or region. Before starting an actual assessment, your core group

should have analyzed its assessment needs, and agreed on a clear set of the objectives and goals for
the process.

IEA Training Manual Workshop for the National Reporting Toolkit (NRT) 21