A comparison with the UNEP indicators (Bable & Wahid , 2008, 2009; Huang et al., 2008) shows that their vulnerability index values are systematically lower than those obtained in this study (Fig. 5 ).
Yet , the pattern of the results is the same, with the exception of the Yellow River basins.
The vulnerability of that basin was assessed to be relatively larger by UNEP than by this study ZFig. 5).