Nature’s Contributions to People in Vulnerability Studies When Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Coastal Landscapes

Abstract

The geographic landscape is a recurrent unit of analysis in vulnerability studies. Single descriptions are often used to show the elements exposed in these landscapes. However, the concept requires specifying the components of the landscape and its functioning as a unit. Thus, the purpose of this research was to use the analysis of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) to describe the global contribution of landscape elements to human activities, prioritizing the units in which the effects of climate change may imply greater impacts on the human population. For this, we analyzed six categories of nature’s contributions applied to the landscape units in a fragment of the Mexican Pacific coast. The units with mangrove cover had the highest nature contributions. It is expected that the application of this approach in the exposure component of vulnerability studies will allow a better understanding of the non-return relationship and the search for adaptive nature-based solutions.