2.2.2. Sensitivity
Sensitivity is the degree to which a system is likely to be affected by a perturbation like an extreme climate event (Gallopin, 2006).Using flooding as an example, sensitivity can be regarded as the likely effects of a system to that event. The magnitude of the effects of an extreme climate event on the system not only depends on the intensity of flooding, but also on the characteristics of area being flooded.Assets accumulated on land are used to represent the sensitivity of the area to an extreme climate event. On the basis of the energetic hierarchy of ecosystems, Odum, Brown, Whitefield, Woithe,and Doherty (1995) suggested that there exists a hierarchical pat-tern related to the specific spatial pattern in the landscape. Urban areas have a higher energetic hierarchy than natural and agricultural systems because energy converges spatially from rural areas toward consumer centers. The intensities and energy content in natural and agriculture areas and urban areas are different. There-fore, the emergy storage of land use for representing the sensitivitycan be estimated by multiplying the area of each land cover typeby its empower density