Abstract
IPCC showed that calculation of climate vulnerability index requires standardization process of various proxy variables for the estimation of climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. In this study, four different methodologies of standardization methods: Z-score, Rescaling, Ranking, and Distance to the reference country, are employed to evaluate climate vulnerability-VRI (Vulnerability-Resilience Indicator) over Korean peninsula, and the error ranges of VRI, arising from employing the different standardization are estimated. All of proxy variables are provided by CCGIS (Climate Change adaptation toolkit based on GIS) which hosts information on both past and current socio-economic data and climate and environmental IPCC SRES (A2, B1, A1B, A1T, A1FI, and A1 scenarios) climate data for the decades of 2000s, 2020s, 2050s, and 2100s. The results showed that Z-score and Rescaling methods showed statistically undistinguishable results with minor differences of spatial distribution, while Ranking and Distance to the reference country methods showed some possibility to lead the different ranking of VRI among South Korean provinces, depending on the local characteristics and reference province. The resultant VRIs calculated from different standardization methods showed Cronbach's alpha of more than 0.84, indicating that all of different methodologies were overall consistent. Similar horizontal distributions were shown with the same trends: VRI increases as province is close to the coastal region and/or it close toward lower latitude, and decreases as it is close to urbanization area. Other characteristics of the four different standardization are discussed in this study.
