Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (36 page)

In closing,
Box 9.1
brings together the opening quotations from each chapter. Together they offer compelling ‘highlights’ of the adaptation story mapped out here, a story that has a long way to run.

From high beginnings framed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Freire quickly reminds us of the challenges ahead for a progressive adaptation. Not only are external structures likely to resist change, but those at risk themselves are apt to choose to support and adapt to the status quo for lack of access to the tools and opportunities to develop and apply critical awareness. The IPCC formulation of adaptation to date aims to provide clarity for the policy community.

Box 9.1
Other voices make the case

Chapter 1
: ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.’ (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3)

Chapter 2
: ‘The adapted man, neither dialoguing nor participating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and uncritical frame of mind.’ (Paulo Freire, 1969:24)

Chapter 3
: ‘The ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.’ (IPCC, 2008:880)

Chapter 4
: ‘When special efforts are made by a diffusion agency, it is possible to narrow, or at least prevent the widening of, socioeconomic gaps in a social system. In other words, widening gaps are not inevitable.’ (Rogers, 1995, 442)

Chapter 5
: ‘Instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.’ (Rousseau, 1973, original 1762:181)

Chapter 6
: ‘What matters is not structures, but relationships.’ (Scientific advisor to the Welsh Assembly)

Chapter 7
: ‘In Cancun the most common idea is that “it is not my problem, if things go bad, I can flee to another state”.’ (Ex-member of the Quintana Roo State Congress)

Chapter 8
: ‘… moments when underlying causes can come together in a brief window, a window ideally suited for mobilizing broader violence. But such events can also have extremely positive outcomes if the tension … are recognized and handled well.’ (USAID, 2002)

Chapter 9
: ‘Too frequently adaptation still reflects a narrow framing, which assumes that climate change is an ultimate, rather than a proximate driver of change.’ (Nelson, 2009:496)

It does this well but should not be confused with a handbook for critical climate consciousness. In making its contribution the IPCC has stayed close to adaptation as resilience. In so doing this has so far bounded out much that can be achieved by transition and transformation. Amongst a range of social activists and thinkers, Rogers and Rousseau remind us of the need for critical consciousness to prevent the loss of hard won social gains and for social progress to be at the heart of development. Taken together, comments from those facing climate change impacts, from a scientific advisor to the Welsh Assembly, an ex-member of the Qunitana Roo State Congress to USAID, show the rich policy landscape of relevance to climate change adaptation and the need to mainstream policy and research into the concerns of everyday development for any aspect of resilience, transition or transformation to succeed. Finally, speaking from the climate change literature, Nelson succinctly captures the framing challenge for climate change adaptation, which the argument and framework presented in this book have sought to face. Climate change is an expression of deeper and often harder to grasp socio-ecological relationships. Adapting to climate change then requires strategies that address these root causes as well as the more proximate concerns. The linkages are there to be made – between livelihoods and governance, or choices on how to spend and invest surplus wealth and connected value systems. We need to make them soon.

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