Abstract

This article situates the Vulnerability Synthesis within emerging understandings of complex climate change risk, intersectionality, and multi-dimensional vulnerability. It explains the assessment and conceptual framing of the Vulnerability Synthesis in the Africa chapter of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report (AR6). It demonstrates that reducing vulnerability has the greatest potential benefits for reducing climate risk in Africa in the near future. It explains how important aspects of vulnerability, like gender disparities, migrant status, or income level, combine to affect risk. A lack of attention to interacting social drivers and their effects on risk, as well as an orientation toward vulnerability analyses at coarse social and spatial levels, highlight severe limitations for climate risk management in current vulnerability scholarship.