Everyday Adaptation: Theorizing climate change adaptation in daily life

Climate science to date demonstrates that natural and human systems must urgently adapt. Adaptation refers to changes in societies and ecological systems as they respond to both actual and anticipated impacts of the changing climate. While adaptation is not limited to the level of planning and policy, existing adaptation practice privileges institutional action. We argue that the definition of adaptation should be broadened to include the small, incremental changes made in our daily lives to accommodate the shifting ecologies in which we live. Drawing on critical adaptation research and our own ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South, we define everyday adaptation as the shifted ways a person works, eats, lives and thinks in response to climate realities, rather than the hardening of coastlines or the relocation of vulnerable structures. We integrate and build on existing scholarship on adaptation and the everyday to theorize the logics of everyday, hyperlocal adaptation. This hyperlocal scale is a critical component of any definition of adaptation and a useful lens for studying the way much of the global population adapts and will continue to adapt their lives to climate change. We offer two theoretical components of adaptation revealed by the everyday - adaptation labor and value adaptation – as lenses to see changes in everyday action. Through considering hyperlocal action, we then identify and explore four logics of everyday adaptation actions: lifestyle stability, socio-ecological reactivity, livelihood flexibility, and community capacity. Everyday adaptations are limited by individuals’ capacity to adapt and thereby determine the longevity, livability, and quality of life of places on the frontlines of climate change. We argue for understanding the aggregate effects of everyday adaptation in order to better align the actions of those living with climate change in their everyday lives and the large-scale adaptation projects aiming to protect them.     

Observed adaptation to climate change: UK evidence of transition to a well-adapting society

This paper investigates whether and to what extent a wide range of actors in the UK are adapting to climate change, and whether this is evidence of a social transition. We document evidence of over 300 examples of early adopters of adaptation practice to climate change in the UK. These examples span a range of activities from small adjustments (or coping), to building adaptive capacity, to implementing actions and to creating deeper systemic change in public and private organisations in a range of sectors. We find that adaptation in the UK has been dominated by government initiatives and has principally occurred in the form of research into climate change impacts. These government initiatives have stimulated a further set of actions at other scales in public agencies, regulatory agencies and regional government (and the devolved administrations), though with little real evidence of climate change adaptation initiatives trickling down to local government level. The sectors requiring significant investment in large scale infrastructure have invested more heavily than those that do not in identifying potential impacts and adaptations. Thus we find a higher level of adaptation activity by the water supply and flood defence sectors. Sectors that are not dependent on large scale infrastructure appear to be investing far less effort and resources in preparing for climate change. We conclude that the UK government-driven top-down targeted adaptation approach has generated anticipatory action at low cost in some areas. We also conclude that these actions may have created enough niche activities to allow for diffusion of new adaptation practices in response to real or perceived climate change. These results have significant implications for how climate policy can be developed to support autonomous adaptors in the UK and other countries.     

Mainstreaming adaptation to climate change in Least Developed Countries (LDCs)

Abstract

The Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are a group of 49 of the world's poorest countries. They have contributed least to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but they are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This is due to their location in some of the most vulnerable regions of the world and their low capacities to adapt to these changes. Adaptation to climate change has become an important policy priority in the international negotiations on climate change in recent years. However, it has yet to become a major policy issue within developing countries, especially the LDCs. This article focuses on two LDCs, namely Bangladesh and Mali, where progress has been made regarding identifying potential adaptation options. For example, Bangladesh already has effective disaster response systems, and strategies to deal with reduced freshwater availability, and Mali has a well-developed programme for providing agro-hydro-meteorological assistance to communities in times of drought. However, much remains to be done in terms of mainstreaming adaptation to climate change within the national policymaking processes of these countries. Policymakers need targeting and, to facilitate this, scientific research must be translated into appropriate language and timescales.     

The role of culture and traditional knowledge in climate change adaptation: Insights from East Kimberley,Australia

Indigenous peoples offer alternative knowledge about climate variability and change based on their own locally developed knowledges and practices of resource use. In this article we discuss the role of traditional ecological knowledge in monitoring and adapting to changing environmental conditions. Our case study documents a project to record the seasonal knowledge of the Miriwoong people in northern Australia. The study demonstrates how indigenous groups’ accumulate detailed baseline information about their environment to guide their resource use and management, and develop worldviews and cultural values associated with this knowledge. We highlight how traditional ecological knowledge plays a critical role in mediating indigenous individuals and communities’ understandings of environmental changes in the East Kimberley region of north-west Australia, and how these beliefs may influence future decision-making about how to go about adapting to climate change at a local level.     

Learning effects of interactive decision-making processes for climate change adaptation

Learning is gaining attention in relation to governance processes for contemporary environmental challenges; however, scholarship at the nexus of learning and environmental governance lacks clarity and understanding about how to define and measure learning, and the linkages between learning, social interactions, and environment. In response, this study aimed to advance and operationalize a typology of learning in an environmental governance context, and examined if a participatory decision-making process (adaptive co-management) for climate change adaptation fostered learning. Three types of learning were identified: cognitive learning, related to the acquisition of new or the structuring of existing knowledge; normative learning, which concerns a shift in viewpoints, values or paradigms, and relational learning, referring to an improved understanding of others’ mindsets, enhanced trust and ability to cooperate. A robust mixed methods approach with a focus on quantitative measures including concept map analysis, social network analysis, and self-reflective questions, was designed to gauge indicators for each learning type. A participatory decision-making process for climate change adaptation was initiated with stakeholders in the Niagara region, Canada. A pseudo-control group was used to minimize external contextual influences on results. Clear empirical evidence of cognitive and relational learning was gained; however, the results from normative learning measures were inconclusive. The learning typology and measurement method operationalized in this research advances previous treatments of learning in relation to participatory decision-making processes, and supports adaptive co-management as a governance strategy that fosters learning and adaptive capacity.     

Classifying knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe for informing adaptation research and decision-making: A conceptual meta-analysis

Knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability is fragmented, because it is found in disparate case studies which use inconsistent terminology and focus on distinct aspects relevant to adaptation. While large-scale syntheses such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provide a high level overview and are useful for international decision-making, there is a need for systematic and flexible access to this research-based knowledge in order to aid future adaptation research and decision-making. Against this background, we present a ‘conceptual’ meta-analysis, a novel approach to meta-analyse studies on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe. The meta-analysis results in a classification scheme for relating the diverse studies. This scheme consists of (i) a classification of studies according to the type of adaptation-relevant results they produce and (ii) a hierarchical classification of the regional and thematic context of studies. The implementation of this scheme, for example in the form of a database, overcomes some of the identified gaps of current adaptation knowledge representation. We furthermore present a quantitative analysis of the classified studies that exemplifies how the developed classification scheme can be applied to get a systematic and quantitative overview of the knowledge they contain. Thus, the conceptual meta-analysis and the classification scheme represent a first step towards a systematisation of knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability and may be seen as a useful complement to qualitative literature reviews.     

Adapting water management to climate change: Institutional involvement,inter-institutional networks and barriers in India

The capacity of a nation to address the hydrological impacts of climate change depends on the institutions through which water is governed. Inter-institutional networks that enable institutions to adapt and the factors that hinder smooth coordination are poorly understood. Using water governance in India as an example of a complex top-down bureaucratic system that requires effective networks between all key institutions, this research unravels the barriers to adaptation by combining quantitative internet data mining and qualitative analysis of interviews with representatives from twenty-six key institutions operating at the national level.Institutions' online presence shows a disconnect in the institutional discourse between climate change and water with institutions such as the Ministries of Water Resources, Earth Sciences and Agriculture, indicating a lesser involvement compared to institutions such as the Ministries of Finance, External Affairs, Planning Commission. The online documents also indicate a more centralised inter-institutional network, emanating from or pointing to a few key institutions including the Planning Commission and Ministry of Environment and Forests. However, the interviews suggest more complex relational dynamics between institutions and also demonstrate a gap between the aspirational ideals of the National Water Mission under the National Action Plan on Climate Change and the realities of climate change adaptation. This arises from institutional barriers, including lengthy bureaucratic processes and systemic failures, that hinder effective inter-institutional networks to facilitate adaptation. The study provides new understanding of the involvement and barriers of complex multi-layered institutions in climate change adaptation.     

Social cohesion and passive adaptation in relation to climate change and disease

Climate change affects biophysical processes related to the transmission of many infectious diseases, with potentially adverse consequences for the health of communities. While our knowledge of biophysical associations between meteorological factors and disease is steadily improving, our understanding of the social processes that shape adaptation to environmental perturbations lags behind. Using computational modeling methods, we explore the ways in which social cohesion can affect adaptation of disease prevention strategies when communities are exposed to different environmental scenarios that influence transmission pathways for diseases such as diarrhea. We developed an agent-based model in which household agents can choose between two behavioral strategies that offer different levels of protection against environmentally mediated disease transmission. One behavioral strategy is initially set as more protective, leading households to adopt it widely, but its efficacy is sensitive to variable weather conditions and stressors such as floods or droughts that modify the disease transmission system. The efficacy of the second strategy is initially moderate relative to the first and is insensitive to environmental changes. We examined how social cohesion (defined as average number of household social network connections) influences health outcomes when households attempt to identify an optimal strategy by copying the behaviors of socially connected neighbors who seem to have adapted successfully in the past. Our simulation experiments suggest that high-cohesion communities are able to rapidly disseminate the initially optimal behavioral strategy compared to low-cohesion communities. This rapid and pervasive change, however, decreases behavioral diversity; i.e., once a high cohesion community settles on a strategy, most or all households adopt that behavior. Following environmental changes that reduce the efficacy of the initially optimal strategy, rendering it suboptimal relative to the alternative strategy, high-cohesion communities can fail to adapt. As a result, despite faring better early in the course of computational experiments, high-cohesion communities may ultimately experience worse outcomes. In the face of uncertainty in predicting future environmental stressors due to climate change, strategies to improve effective adaptation to optimal disease prevention strategies should balance between intervention efforts that promote protective behaviors based on current scientific understanding and the need to guard against the crystallization of inflexible norms. Developing generalizable models allows us to integrate a wide range of theories and multiple datasets pertaining to the relationship between social mechanisms and adaptation, which can provide further understanding of future climate change impacts. Models such as the one we present can generate hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of adaptation events and suggest specific points of measurement to assess the impact of these mechanisms. They can be incorporated as modules within predictive simulations for specific socio-ecological contexts.     

Community level adaptation to climate change: The potential role of participatory community risk assessment

This paper explores the value of using community risk assessments (CRAs) for climate change adaptation. CRA refers to participatory methods to assess hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities in support of community-based disaster risk reduction, used by many NGOs, community-based organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. We review the evolution of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster risk reduction, and highlight the challenges of integrating global climate change into a bottom-up and place-based approach. Our analysis of CRAs carried out by various national Red Cross societies shows that CRAs can help address those challenges by fostering community engagement in climate risk reduction, particularly given that many strategies to deal with current climate risks also help to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Climate change can also be explicitly incorporated in CRAs by making better use of CRA tools to assess trends, and by addressing the notion of changing risks. However, a key challenge is to keep CRAs simple enough for wide application. This demands special attention in the modification of CRA tools; in the background materials and trainings for CRA facilitators; and in the guidance for interpretation of CRA outcomes. A second challenge is the application of a limited set of CRA results to guide risk reduction in other communities and to inform national and international adaptation policy. This requires specific attention for sampling and care in scaling up qualitative findings. Finally, stronger linkages are needed between organizations facilitating CRAs and suppliers of climate information, particularly addressing the translation of climate information to the community level.     

Drought and the future of rural communities: Opportunities and challenges for climate change adaptation in regional Victoria,Australia

Australia's vulnerability to climate variability and change has been highlighted by the recent drought (i.e. the Big Dry or Millennium Drought), and also recent flooding across much of eastern Australia during 2011 and 2012. There is also the possibility that the frequency, intensity and duration of droughts may increase due to anthropogenic climate change, stressing the need for robust drought adaptation strategies. This study investigates the socio-economic impacts of drought, past and present drought adaptation measures, and the future adaptation strategies required to deal with projected impacts of climate change. The qualitative analysis presented records the actual experiences of drought and other climatic extremes and helps advance knowledge of how best to respond and adapt to such conditions, and how this might vary between different locations, sectors and communities. It was found that more effort is needed to address the changing environment and climate, by shifting from notions of ‘drought-as-crisis’ towards acknowledging the variable availability of water and that multi-year droughts should not be unexpected, and may even become more frequent. Action should also be taken to revalue the farming enterprise as critical to our environmental, economic and cultural well-being and there was also strong consensus that the value of water should be recognised in a more meaningful way (i.e. not just in economic terms). Finally, across the diverse stakeholders involved in the research, one point was consistently reiterated: that ‘it's not just drought’. Exacerbating the issues of climate impacts on water security and supply is the complexity of the agriculture industry, global economics (in particular global markets and the recent/ongoing global financial crisis), and demographic changes (decreasing and ageing populations) which are currently occurring across most rural communities. The social and economic issues facing rural communities are not just a product of drought or climate change – to understand them as such would underestimate the extent of the problems and inhibit the ability to coordinate the holistic, cross-agency approach needed for successful climate change adaptation in rural communities.     

Harmonising climate change adaptation and mitigation: The case of tourist resorts in Fiji

Tourism in island states is vulnerable to climate change because it may result in detrimental changes in relation to extreme events, sea level rise, transport and communication interruption. This study analyses adaptation to climate change by tourist resorts in Fiji, as well as their potential to reduce climate change through reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Interviews, site visitations, and an accommodation survey were undertaken. Many operators already prepare for climate-related events and therefore adapt to potential impacts resulting from climate change. Reducing emissions is not important to operators; however, decreasing energy costs for economic reasons is practised. Recommendations for further initiatives are made and synergies between the adaptation and mitigation approaches are explored.     

Unpacking multilevel adaptation to climate change in the Great Barrier Reef,Australia

Multilevel governance is regarded as a promising approach to deal with the multidimensional nature of climate change adaptation. However, the policy context in which it is implemented is very often complex and fragmented, characterised by interacting climate and non-climate strategies. An understanding of multilevel decision-making and governance is particularly important, if desired adaptation outcomes are to be achieved. This paper examines how climate change adaptation takes place in a complex multilevel system of governance, in the context of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) region. It examines over one hundred adaptation strategies at federal, state, regional and local levels in terms of type, manifestation, purposefulness, drivers and triggers, and geographic and temporal scope. Interactions between strategies are investigated both at the same level of governance and across governance levels. This study demonstrates that multilevel approach is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition in responding to complex multiscale and multisector issues, such as climate change adaptation. Short-term adaptation measures; a predominant incremental, sectoral, top-down approach to adaptation; and the lack of a framework for managing interactions are major threats to effective climate adaptation in the GBR region. Coping with such threats will require long-term transformative action, establishing enabling conditions to support local adaptation, and, most important, creating and maintaining strategic interactions among adaptation strategies. Coordinating and integrating climate and non-climate strategies across jurisdictions and policy sectors are the most significant and challenging tasks for multilevel governance in the GBR region and elsewhere.     

京津冀城市群气候变化及影响适应研究综述

本文对2000年以来京津冀城市群气候变化及影响适应的研究成果进行了综述。研究表明：20世纪60年代以来,京津冀城市群年平均气温和极端高温指数显著升高,年降水量波动减少,到21世纪10年代,极端强降水指数降低。京津冀气候变化是全球变暖和城市化共同作用的结果,城市化加速了京津冀变暖趋势,增加了极端高温和极端强降水的频率和强度,气候风险高。未来京津冀城市群协同发展,面临高温热浪、强降水、水资源短缺和海平面上升等风险将更严峻,气候变化适应是京津冀城市群可持续发展面临的紧迫问题,适应策略等方面研究已取得了明显进展,但适用性和针对性还存在不足。本文提出了未来研究展望：深入研究城市化对气候变化的反馈,发展全球气候变化和城市化共同作用下的气候风险精细化预估技术,系统研究气候变化对城市的影响和不同行业的脆弱性,加强温室气体监测评估技术研究,加强适应气候变化的策略、路径和技术研究。     

Some economics of ‘dangerous’ climate change: Reflections on the Stern Review

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change concluded that there can be “no doubt” the economic risks of business-as-usual (BAU) climate change are “very severe” [Stern, 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury, London, p. 188]. The total cost of climate change was estimated to be equivalent to a one-off, permanent 5–20% loss in global mean per-capita consumption today. And the marginal damage cost of a tonne of carbon emitted today was estimated to be around $312 [p. 344]. Both of these estimates are higher than most reported in the previous literature. Subsequently, a number of critiques have appeared, arguing that discounting is the principal explanation for this discrepancy. Discounting is important, but in this paper we emphasise that how one approaches the economics of risk and uncertainty, and how one attempts to model the very closely related issue of low-probability/high-damage scenarios (which we connect to the recent discussion of ‘dangerous’ climate change), can matter just as much. We demonstrate these arguments empirically, using the same models applied in the Stern Review. Together, the issues of risk and uncertainty on the one hand, and ‘dangerous’ climate change on the other, raise very strongly questions about the limits of a welfare-economic approach, where the loss of natural capital might be irreversible and impossible to compensate. Thus we also critically reflect on the state-of-the-art in integrated assessment modelling. There will always be an imperative to carry out integrated assessment modelling, bringing together scientific ‘fact’ and value judgement systematically. But we agree with those cautioning against a literal interpretation of current estimates. Ironically, the Stern Review is one of those voices. A fixation with cost-benefit analysis misses the point that arguments for stabilisation should, and are, built on broader foundations.     

Compounds, creativity and complexity in climate change communication: The case of ‘carbon indulgences’

This article deals with climate change from a linguistic perspective. Climate change is an extremely complex issue that has exercised the minds of experts and policy makers with renewed urgency in recent years. It has prompted an explosion of writing in the media, on the internet and in the domain of popular science and literature, as well as a proliferation of new compounds around the word ‘carbon’ as a hub, such as ‘carbon indulgence’, a new compound that will be studied in this article. Through a linguistic analysis of lexical and discourse formations around such ‘carbon compounds’ we aim to contribute to a broader understanding of the meaning of climate change. Lexical carbon compounds are used here as indicators for observing how human symbolic cultures change and adapt in response to environmental threats and how symbolic innovation and transmission occurs.     

‘Energy security’ and ‘climate change’: Constructing UK energy discursive realities

Recently, in the United Kingdom, two issues have dominated the energy policy agenda: effective climate change mitigation and energy security. Whilst evolving government policy has led to government support for new build nuclear power as part of the nation's future energy mix, limited attention has been devoted to examining how arguments were constructed to lead ‘naturally’ to nuclear new build as an option for addressing these two issues. Using Critical Discourse Analysis this paper analyses the struggles within the climate change mitigation and energy security discourses in generating and/or replacing meanings. In particular, it examines how construction of the dominant (hegemonic) discourses led ‘naturally’ to the necessity of new build nuclear power. This paper draws upon 24 stakeholder interviews to examine the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. It outlines how climate change and energy security were perceived as motivators for energy policy; it shows how the combination of the dominant construction of climate change as an environmental issue and the construction of energy security as a ‘gas gap’ lent weight to the argument for nuclear new build. Struggling against these discourses is a counter-hegemonic discourse centred around climate change as a symptom of unsustainability and energy security as a lack of energy diversity. The latter, rather than ‘naturally’ proposing an urgent need for nuclear new build, lead to the argument for readdressing the focus of, and use of resources by, society - reducing energy demand and increasing energy supply diversity.     

将适应气候变化纳入国土空间规划：进展、困境与思路

空间规划是适应气候变化的重要政策工具之一,将适应气候变化目标纳入空间规划已经成为国际主流政策。中国适应气候变化的空间规划仍面临诸多问题和挑战,包括气候适应目标和理念薄弱、气候变化风险评估与空间规划尺度不匹配、适应和减缓策略的协同机制欠缺、技术标准和法律法规不完善等。文章结合国家适应气候变化战略和国土空间规划体系重构的目标要求,研究提出适应气候变化导向的国土空间规划框架体系和技术思路,以及将适应气候变化纳入空间规划编制审批、技术标准、实施监督以及法规政策等各个环节的思路与建议,以期通过空间规划的编制与监督实施促进适应气候变化目标的实现。     

Emerging meta-organisations and adaptation to global climate change: Evidence from implementing adaptation in Nepal,Pakistan and Ghana

As developing countries move from policy to implementing adaptation to climate change, formal operational structures are emerging that exceed the expertise of any one actor. We refer to these arrangements as ‘meta-organisations’ that comprise many autonomous component organisations tackling adaptation. The meta-organisations set standards, define purposes, and specify appropriate means-ends criteria for delivering adaptation. Using empirical data from the three cases, Nepal, Pakistan and Ghana, the study identifies and analyses six attributes of the meta and component organisational structures. We argue that organisational structures are crucial to understanding adaptation, specifying policy and implementation. Our analysis demonstrates that while each country promotes similar objectives, the emerging structures are quite distinct, shaped by country-specific attributes and issues that lead to different outcomes. Nepal’s priority for a formal process has come at the cost of delayed implementation. Pakistan’s devolved approach lacks legitimacy to scale up the process nationally. Ghana’s use of existing decentralised structures and budgets relegates adaptation below other development priorities. These divergent structures arise from the different needs for legitimacy and accountability, and the relative priority attached to adaptation against other needs.     

Assessing vulnerability of selected farming communities in the Philippines based on a behavioural model of agent's adaptation to global environmental change

Behavioural models that allow simple representation of the complexity of human–environment links are important in vulnerability assessment because they allow the analysis of human adaptive processes in a changing environment. This paper applies an agent-based framework that considers the behavioural model of farmers in three villages in a municipality in the Philippines. Agent-based modelling is a useful policy tool for simulating the effects of different adaptation options on reducing vulnerability because it allows representation of not only the dynamic changes in climate and market but also the dynamic adaptive process of different groups of communities to the impacts of these changes. Model simulations of adaptation options under various global change scenarios showed that production support would significantly reduce future vulnerability only if complemented with appropriate market support. It is thus important for policy to provide a complementary bundle of adaptation measures. Lack of money and information are the most important reasons for not applying available technical adaptation measures, which currently hinder reduction of vulnerability in selected villages in the municipality. Social networks, which play an important role in adapting to environmental changes, are limited to relatives and neighbours, who are important sources of informal credit.