The first aim this study was to develop an approach for river basin vulnerability analyses that would be universally applicable for any major river basin of the planet and produce intercompar – able results.
Given this scope, the developed approach was delib – erately designed to be relatively simple.
The results obtained by using the recently developed vulnerability indices (Bable & Wahid, 2008,2009; Chang et al.,2007; Huang et al., 2008; Pandey et al.,2010) are of great value, yet in our view the used approaches lack the general applicability and comparability for basins in different parts of the world .