2021 Social Vulnerability Assessment at the Civil Parish Level in Mainland Portugal

The dataset represents Social Vulnerability (SV) and its main drivers, at the civil parish, in mainland Portugal, using the 2021 Census data. This assessment was conducted under the scope of the concluded FCT-funded project “HIGH WATERS – Assessment of scenarios of exposure and social vulnerability to sea level rise for sustainable land use” (EXPL/GES-AMB/1246/2021), whose objectives are: to identify hazardous areas in relation to SLR by applying and downscaling global models for forecasting SNM; to diagnose land use land cover (LULC) changes with focus on build-environments over the last 20 years and project them to mid- and long-term scenarios; to diagnose exposure, vulnerability (both physical & social) and coping capacity and project them to the end of the century; to build mid and long-term municipality SLR risk profiles and identify its main driving forces; to propose a roadmap for SLR adaptation regarding mid- and long-term land use planning strategies.

As an intermediate product, an SV assessment was carried out to the entire mainland area, following the statistical approach of the SoVI© and incorporating variables descriptive of the support capability of the territory, following the theoretical principles defined by Cutter et al. (2003), Mendes et al. (2011), Mendes, Tavares and Santos (2019).

The dataset is a polygonal vector in the ESRI shapefile format and, additionally to the shapefile, includes two documents with methodological notes, PCA results and metadata. The shapefile contains the scores of social vulnerability and the scores of the extracted 8 principal components (PCs) that represent the following dimensions: PC1 - Age and old urban context; PC2 - Overcrowded dwellings; PC3 – Unemployment; PC4 - Socioeconomic status; PC5 – Mobility; PC6 - Social risk groups; PC7 - Housing conditions; PC8 - Women and foreign residents with unqualified jobs.

References

Cutter, S.L., Boruff, B.J. and Shirley, W.L. (2003), “Social vulnerability to environmental hazards”, Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 84 No. 2, pp. 242-261, https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6237.8402002 .

Mendes, J.M., Tavares, A., Cunha, L. and Freiria, S. (2011), “Social vulnerability to natural and technological hazards: the relevance of scale”, in Briš, R., Soares, C.G. and Martorell, S. (Eds), Reliability, Risk and Safety, Theory and Applications, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Leiden, pp. 445-451.

Mendes, J.M., Tavares, A.O. and Santos, P.P. (2019), "Social vulnerability and local level assessments: a new approach for planning", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 15-43. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-10-2019-0069