The effects of global environmental change, already tangible worldwide, are projected to increase in the future, putting at further risk ecosystems and societies. Vulnerability assessments have become widely used to study how social-ecological systems are exposed and resilient to climate change or cumulative stressors. Many of these assessments, however, implicitly add up entangled current and latent dimensions of vulnerability. In this chapter, we argue that conceptualizing the difference between current and latent, as well as present and future dimensions of vulnerability, would benefit vulnerability assessments as time represents both a barrier and a lever to adaptation. Using published literature, we assess the links between past, present, and future vulnerability, propose a definition of current and latent dimensions of vulnerability and then discuss practical methods and indicators to assess them.