Vulnerability is assessed by considering six “life-supporting sectors”: food, water, health, ecosystem services, human habitat and infrastructure. Each sector in turn represents three cross-cutting components: the exposure to climate-related hazards, the sensitivity to those impacts and the adaptive capacity to cope or adapt. Exposure is measured by projected changes in (not levels of) the following components, some of which are due to projected climate change: cereal yields, population, water run-off, groundwater recharge, deaths from climate change induced diseases, length of transmission season of vector-borne diseases, biome distribution, marine biodiversity, warm period, flood hazard, hydropower generation capacity and sea-level rise impacts.