Vulnerability

For other uses of the word "Vulnerability", please refer to vulnerability (computer science) You may also want to refer to natural disaster.

Vulnerability is the susceptibility to physical or emotional injury or attack. It also means to have one's guard down, open to censure or criticism; assailable. Vulnerability refers to a person's state of being liable to succumb, as to persuasion or temptation.

In relation to hazards and disasters, vulnerability is a concept that links the relationship that people have with their environment to social forces and institutions and the cultural values that sustain and contest them. “The concept of vulnerability expresses the multidimensionality of disasters by focusing attention on the totality of relationships in a given social situation which constitute a condition that, in combination with environmental forces, produces a disaster” (Bankoff et al. 2004: 11).

Reference:

Bankoff, Greg, George Frerks and Dorothea Hilhorst. 2004. Mapping Vulnerability. Sterling: Earthscan.