Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (3 page)

In seeking to make the social and political elements of adaptation visible three questions run throughout this book and structure its narrative:

1. How is adaptive capacity shaped?

Or, to what extent is adaptive capacity dependent upon existing institutional and actor capacity; can it be constructed anew through external influence or through autonomous actions?

2. How is adaptive capacity turned into adaptive action?

Or, what institutions and actors are important in mediating this threshold and the wider feedback between action and future capacity?

3. What are the human security outcomes of adaptive actions?

Or, how far do framing institutions and individual actors control processes of adaptation and how does this affect the exercise of rights and responsibilities in society, and the social distribution of well being, basic needs, human rights and subsequent adaptive capacity?

The following sections in this introductory chapter establish the scope of the book. First adaptation is defined and the approach taken to make climate change and associated adaptations visible explained. Second, to help contextualise this work, some of the main strands in contemporary adaptation theory are presented. Finally the structure of the book is outlined.

Adaptation in the face of environmental change is nothing new. Individuals and socio-ecological systems have always responded to external pressures. But climate change brings a particular challenge. Uncertainty in the ways through which climate change will be felt set against its speed and scale of impact, combined with the invisibility of causal linkages in everyday life, bring new challenges for the sustainability of socio-ecological systems. It is for this reason that understanding adaptation to climate change is a critical challenge of our time. As the title of this book suggests, adaptation is conceived of here as a dynamic phenomenon – as a process rather than a status. An individual or business may be well adapted to a particular moment in history, but the dynamism of climate change requires an adaptation that can coevolve with it. Climate change is no longer an external threat to be managed ‘out there’, but is an intimate element of human history – both an outcome and driver of development decisions for individuals, organisations and governments. This requires a closer look at social relations and practices, even values, as sites for adaptation, and suggests that it is necessary, but not sufficient, to control the impacts of climate change through technological innovations like environmental engineering and crop selection.

There are many ways of characterising adaptation, which as an intellectual construct cannot be directly observed. Here a key distinction is made between adaptation that is forward or backward looking. As a backward looking attribute, adaptation is revealed by capacity to cope during moments of stress or shock. For example, well-adapted urban communities have fewer losses to hurricane events. Greater capacity in Cuba’s early warning and evacuation systems when compared to the southern states of the USA in large part explain the far lower human losses in Cuba from hurricane events (UNDP, 2004). As a forward looking attribute, adaptation cannot be revealed through impacts (which have not yet
happened) and instead is made visible through theoretically identified components associated with adaptive capacity. An important gap in our understanding of adaptation comes from the difficulty of being able to follow adaptive processes over time and so verify through observation the contribution of theoretically defined components on adaptive practices.

Despite this caveat, our focus is on forward looking adaptation. It is here that adaptation has the potential to intervene in development policy and practice through progressive risk reduction. To this extent the work is driven by theoretical understandings of what constitutes adaptive capacity. On the ground, however, past experiences that reveal backward looking adaptation can feed in to local understandings of the pressures shaping capacity looking forward. A full discussion of adaptation theory is presented in
Chapter 2
.

For researchers and policy makers alike the invisibility of forward looking adaptive capacity is compounded by the dynamism of climate change. For specific physical or ecological systems change can be gradual and persistent – for example, in sea level rise. For others temporary equilibrium may be violently disrupted when thresholds are breached and systems enter new states – for example, the potential reversal of the thermohaline circulation system in the North Atlantic. The impact of such global scale processes is mediated by local socio-ecological and environmental conditions. This has led many to argue that adaptation is a local agenda in contrast to mitigation, which is global. While our concern is with adaptation, we make a case for both agendas to have local and global components and indeed national level action too. High level legal frameworks and voluntary agreements can support local action, but local level action is also a potential driver for higher level policy. Where political will is absent at higher levels, local action has the potential to be decisive in determining capacity and action and influencing higher level policy. This is the case for mitigation and adaptation – for investing in zero carbon lifestyles and technology as much as livelihood diversification. Those fundamental social attributes that enable and shape adaptive capacity also influence the potential for local contributions to mitigation (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003).

Climate change is also a slippery concept to demonstrate empirically. Outside of the imaginary worlds of computer models it is as yet impossible to determine the proportion of any hydrological or meteorological event that is attributable to climate change. O’Brien and Leichenko (2003) were among the first to argue that searching for the incremental risk associated with climate change is a lost cause and many years away from resolution. Meanwhile the numbers of people and socio-ecological systems at risk and bearing loss from climate change associated events is increasing. Climate change is manifest locally through extreme events and in the heightened variability of precipitation, temperature and wind. We may never understand the precise contribution of anthropocentric climate change to these events and trends but we can be certain that climate change is a decisive contributing factor and that vulnerability exists, demanding action.

While mitigation was clearly defined in the original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiated in the Rio Summit, 1992, adaptation was not. Despite this the term was used in the agreement text. Its meaning continues to be debated (Burton, 2004). Arguably it is the slipperiness of the term that has been part of its attraction for discussion in academic and policy circles alike. Here we present an overview of some of the main contributions to the adaptation debate as scholars and policy makers have sought to make sense of the term handed to them from the UNFCCC. The section begins with an assessment of the influence of the IPCC–UNFCCC on scholarly work on climate change adaptation, of the ways in which climate change impacts are evaluated and the geographical distribution of climate change impact risk. From this point an overview of work on social aspects of adaptation is presented around four questions that cross-cut research. This discussion is a prelude to that in
Chapter 2
, which offers an extended response to the intellectual inheritance and current shape of adaptation to build a conceptual framework.

The IPCC and UNFCCC procedures and agendas have greatly influenced the direction of thinking as well as policy on climate change adaptation. There is a high level of interaction between these institutions, with the IPCC feeding into the UNFCCC process, which in turn helps to drive funding and political will for adaptive actions and research. The stated aim of the IPCC is to support national policy on climate change through offering scientific consensus. Founded in 1988, the IPCC has produced Assessment Reports in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. Each in turn has included a greater emphasis on adaptation as evidence has accumulated. In this way the IPCC has acted as both a stimulus and a resource for research on adaptation to climate change.

The First Assessment Report helped to shape the UNFCCC and drive its ratification at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio, 1992 (Agrawala, 2005), but said relatively little about adaptation. It was in the Second Assessment Report that the socio-economic aspects of climate change were seriously addressed for the first time. The report concluded by sketching out the scope of support needed for adaptation. It argued that efficient adaptation depended upon the availability of financial resources, technology transfer and cultural, educational, managerial, institutional, legal and regulatory practices, both domestic and international. The vision was firmly on the potential roles and responsibilities of international actors with limited evidence of local adaptive behaviour. The Third Assessment Report included a greater focus on adaptation strategies and concluded that adaptation was necessary to complement mitigation efforts raising the significance of adaptation in the UNFCCC process and helping to achieve the Nairobi work programme. The Fourth Assessment Report stated that adaptation was necessary to address the impacts of climate change, was clear that this was already occurring and that more extensive
adaptation than was being undertaken would be necessary to address future vulnerability to climate change. Hinting at the possibility of a progressive adaptation agenda, the report also connected sustainable development with vulnerability to climate change, and argued that climate change could impede national abilities to follow sustainable development pathways. This report provided the scientific basis for the Bali Action Plan reached by parties at the 13th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP).

While the IPCC process is scientific it reports back to governments and is influenced by their interests and priorities (Grundmann, 2007). It has been described as a boundary object, and a hybrid science-policy project at the interface between science and politics. As a consensus organisation, and one open to intense public scrutiny, it is conservative, careful to follow core science rather than policy or advocacy trends. This has been its strength in terms of scientific credibility for policy makers, but has also made it difficult for some evidence on climate change and human reaction to be included. For example, much local evidence for climate change impacts and experience in adaptation, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, is gained by local actors and held by civil society actors or published nationally or regionally – but not in international peer review journals – and so has been difficult to include. The IPCC in this respect offers a conservative, rigorous view of climate change, but should not be seen as a full acccount of existing information or knowledge. The Fourth Assessment Report from Working Group II began to address this by drawing also from the grey literature produced by governments and NGOs. A concern for inclusiveness in scientific representation from all world regions has also led to a quota system and travel funds to support participation from scientists based in low- and middle-income countries. Even so, this does not mean that governments are equally happy with IPCC findings, with various US governments largely ignoring the IPCC while others (especially in Europe) have endorsed and acted upon it through the UNFCCC and unilaterally (Grundmann, 2007).

The IPCC process has also been constrained by its slow recognition of the full contribution to climate change debates to be made from parallel disciplines or policy areas that may cover very similar ground but not use the language of climate change or publish in climate change associated journals. Thus, for example, the considerable academic and policy literatures on disaster risk reduction, social security and food security in developing countries, community-based water management and risk insurance are making only slow impact on the IPCC. Such a sharp focus was perhaps appropriate to managing information on the natural and physical science components of climate change. For Working Group II’s remit of vulnerability and adaptation, where impacts and responses often build on past experience but ultimately transcend policy or disciplinary boundaries, this is less helpful – at times threatening that the IPCC will reinvent theoretical or methodological lessons that could better be brought in from other specialisms.

For example, much of early conceptual work on adaptation mirrored existing work on coping within the food security and disaster risk disciplines. The Fourth Assessment Report from Working Group II went some way to addressing this concern with the inclusion of cross-sector and indeed cross-report case studies including the consequences and responses to Hurricane Katrina and the vulnerability of mega-deltas (IPCC, 2007). Working Group II also took the lead role between 2009–11 in organising a Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, to help bring knowledge from disaster risk management into climate change adaptation. At this stage of mapping and understanding vulnerability and adaptation the inclusion of knowledge from cognate areas is important. However, it is also key that the IPCC be seen in context. It is a mechanism for consolidating knowledge for the policy community on climate change. As the IPCC increasingly recognises parallel communities the challenge will be in retaining its core purpose and intellectual focus while embracing ever wider sources of knowledge. For the academic community the challenge is to communicate effectively with the IPCC process without restricting analysis and thought to the priorities of the IPCC.