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.     

Are we adapting to climate change?

Human systems will have to adapt to climate change. Understanding of the magnitude of the adaptation challenge at a global scale, however, is incomplete, constrained by a limited understanding of if and how adaptation is taking place. Here we develop and apply a methodology to track and characterize adaptation action; we apply these methods to the peer-reviewed, English-language literature. Our results challenge a number of common assumptions about adaptation while supporting others: (1) Considerable research on adaptation has been conducted yet the majority of studies report on vulnerability assessments and natural systems (or intentions to act), not adaptation actions. (2) Climate change is rarely the sole or primary motivator for adaptation action. (3) Extreme events are important adaptation stimuli across regions. (4) Proactive adaptation is the most commonly reported adaptive response, particularly in developed nations. (5) Adaptation action is more frequently reported in developed nations, with middle income countries underrepresented and low-income regions dominated by reports from a small number of countries. (6) There is limited reporting on adaptations being developed to take advantage of climate change or focusing on women, elderly, or children.     

Taming São Paulo’s floods: Dominant discourses,exclusionary practices,and the complicity of the media

Climate change leads to more frequent and severe flooding, urging cities to adapt to protect their populations and assets. Despite exacerbated hazards, governments repeatedly draw on ‘tried-and-true’ approaches to protect the status quo, often with serious adverse effects for the poor and vulnerable. Yet, such dominant approaches do not go unchallenged as the media and other actors prompt public debate to assess flood impacts, scrutinise government decisions, and perhaps even promote alternative practices. News outlets are not, however, balanced or value-free; the events portrayed and the voices (and knowledges) recognised and included in media coverage deeply influence whether and how flooding is incorporated in policy. Focusing on São Paulo, Brazil, we examine how the media framed flood events and conveyed solutions during the city’s worst floods in recorded history. We demonstrate how competing media outlets largely depicted flooding as a natural phenomenon to be solved by governments and experts through existing techno-managerial practices, mirroring governmental partisan plans for adaptive action. In doing so, the media failed to offer a democratic space for public discussion, citizen contestation, and the advancement of alternative trajectories for adaptation. We posit that inclusive trajectories that address entrenched vulnerabilities and projected climate change will benefit from rigorous ethical debates around the media’s role in disaster coverage while strategically leveraging alternative media outlets as public pedagogy and agenda-setting tools.     

The role of adaptive capacity in incremental and transformative adaptation in three large U.S. Urban water systems

Urban water systems need to serve increasing numbers of people under a changing climate. Studies of systems facing extreme events, such as drought, can clarify the nature of adaptive capacity and whether this might support incremental (marginal changes) or transformative adaptation (fundamental system shifts) to climate change. We conducted comparative case studies of three major metropolitan water systems in the United States to understand how actions taken in response to drought affected adaptive capacity and whether the adaptive capacity observed in these systems fosters the preconditions needed for transformative adaptation. We find that while there is ample evidence of existing and potential adaptive capacity, this can be either enabled or diminished by the specific actions taken and their cascading effects on other parts of the system. We also find social dimensions, such as public acceptance, learning, trust, and collaboration, to be as critical as physical elements of adaptive capacity in urban water systems. Finally, we suggest that changes in practices initiated during drought, combined with sustained engagement, collaboration, and education, can lead to substantial and long-lasting changes in values around water, a precursor to transformative adaptation.     

Shared injustice,splintered solidarity: Water governance across urban-rural divides

In response to rapid urbanization and intensifying climatological instability, cities are implementing major water infrastructure projects to mitigate water supply and flood risks. Drawing on four cases from South and Southeast Asia, we show how megacities’ search for additional water supplies or sites to store floodwater repeatedly disadvantage the most vulnerable groups in rural and urban areas. Rather than rehashing urban–rural conflicts, we argue these outcomes demonstrate the continuous reproduction of water insecurity for a class of society that is dispossessed of water and rural livelihoods, excluded from water and land access within the cities they migrate to, and evicted from flood-securitized cities back to the periphery. Water-related injustices confronting the urban poor mirror injustices along the entire water governance spectrum that begins and ends in rural areas. These shared vulnerabilities suggest opportunities for solidarity across urban–rural divides and novel directions for research and coalition building. A fundamental challenge ahead will be whether and how urban and rural poor groups can build regional or national alliances across geographic and identity divides.     

Disrupting path dependency: Making room for Indigenous knowledge in river management

Scholars frequently identify how path dependency serves to constrain the process of climate adaptation and is a key feature of maladaptation. Most studies, however, centre on theoretical, rather than empirical-based discussions of what path dependency is, how it occurs, and what factors assist in breaking path dependency. This paper provides a case study for the creation, maintenance, and attempts to break path dependency within the management of rivers in the Rangitāiki Plains of Aotearoa New Zealand from the 1890s until 2017. We deploy a historical institutionalist theorising on path dependency and institutional arrangements, while also incorporating ideas from indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, which extends current understandings of the factors that contribute towards path dependency at a local level. Through archival research, we demonstrate how successive generations of government policies and actions directed with a specific goal and underpinned by the hegemonic social values created a profoundly path dependent system of managing rivers and flood events. Increased flood vulnerability is one of the direct consequences of the plethora of freshwater engineering interventions which were (and are still) undertaken on the Rangitāiki Plains over the last century. The foundation of this path dependency, we argue, resides with the processes of indigenous dispossession and the marginalisation of Māori values from environmental governance and policy. Efforts to break path dependency, therefore, involve the formal recognition of Māori governance, values, and knowledge within policies, and the translation of Māori values into tangible actions that seek to destabilise Western command-and control approaches to flood risk management.     

Informing national adaptation for sustainable development through spatial systems modelling

Acute climate-change hazards, such as floods or storm surges, can affect a nation’s built and natural environment assets that are critical for development and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To reduce the impacts of such acute climate-change hazards and safeguard development, national decision-makers require evidence on where and how hazards affect SDG achievement to better inform adaptation. Here, we develop a systems methodology that spatially models the impacts of climate-change hazards across a nation’s entire built and natural environment assets and its interdependent influences on the SDG targets to inform national adaptation. We apply our methodology in Saint Lucia through a participatory approach with decision-makers across 18 government ministries, academia, and the private sector. Results reveal that acute climate-change hazards can affect half of Saint Lucia’s assets across 22 sectors, which can influence 89% of all SDG targets. Application of our methodology provided evidence on where and how to prioritise adaptation, thereby helping to add spatial granularity to 52 measures under Saint Lucia’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP) as well as specificity on how limited capacity for cross-sectoral coordination can be directed to safeguard SDG targets. Adaptation does not necessarily imply investing in physical asset protection: results show the need to protect critical natural environments which provide important adaptation services to the built environment. As more nations develop and revise their NAPs and Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, strategic planning across sectors – as demonstrated in Saint Lucia – will be critical to facilitate adaptation that safeguards SDG achievement.     

Navigating climate crises in the Great Barrier Reef

A dramatic escalation of extreme climate events is challenging the capacity of environmental governance regimes to sustain and improve ecosystem outcomes. It has been argued that actors within adaptive governance regimes can help to steer environmental systems toward sustainability in times of crisis. Yet there is little empirical evidence of how acute climate crises are navigated by actors operating within adaptive governance regimes, and the factors that influence their responses. Here, we qualitatively assessed the actions key governance actors took in response to back-to-back mass coral bleaching – an extreme climate event – of the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017, and explored their perceptions of barriers and catalysts to these responses. This research was, in part, a product of collaboration and knowledge co-production with Great Barrier Reef governance actors aimed at improving responses to climate crises in the region. We found five major categories of activity that actors engaged with in the wake of recurrent mass coral bleaching: assessing the scale and extent of bleaching, sharing information, communicating bleaching to the public, building local resilience, and addressing global threats. These actions were both catalyzed and hindered by a range of factors that fall within different domains of adaptive capacity; such as assets, social organization, and agency. We discuss the implications of our findings as they relate to existing research on adaptive capacity and adaptive governance. We conclude by coalescing insights from our interviews and a participant engagement process to highlight four key ways in which the ability of governance actors, and the Great Barrier Reef governance regime more broadly, can be better prepared for, and more effectively respond to extreme climate events. Our research provides empirical insight into how crises are experienced by governance actors in a large-scale environmental system, potentially providing lessons for similar systems across the globe.     

The principal-agent problem and climate change adaptation on public lands

Climate change presents clear risks to natural resources, which carry potential economic costs. The limited nature of physical, financial, human and natural resources means that governments, as managers of natural resources, must make careful decisions regarding trade-offs and the potential future value of investments in climate change adaptation. This paper presents cost-benefit analysis of scenarios to characterise economic benefits of adaptation from the perspective of a public institution (the provincial government) and private agents (forest licensees). The example provided is the context of assisted migration strategies for regenerating forests that are currently being implemented in British Columbia to reduce future impacts of climate change on forests. The analysis revealed positive net present value of public investment in assisted migration across all scenarios under a range of conditions; however, private sector agents face disincentives to adopt these strategies. Uncertainty about how the costs, benefits and risks associated with climate change impacts will be distributed among public institutions and private actors influences incentives to adapt to climate change (the “principal-agent problem”) and further complicates adaptation. Absent development of risk-sharing mechanisms or re-alignment of incentives, uptake of assisted migration strategies by private agents is likely to be limited, creating longer-term risks for public institutions. Analyzing incentives and disincentives facing principals and agents using a well-known tool (cost-benefit analysis) can help decision-makers to identify and address underlying barriers to climate change adaptation in the context of public lands management.     

National-level factors affecting planned,public adaptation to health impacts of climate change

Our understanding of whether adaptive capacity on a national level is being translated into adaptation policies, programs, and projects is limited. Focusing on health adaptation in Annex I Parties to the UNFCCC, we examine whether statistically significant relationships exist between regulatory, institutional, financial, and normative aspects of national-level adaptive capacity and systematically measured adaptation. Specifically, we (i) quantify adaptation actions in Annex I nations, (ii) identify potential factors that might impact progress on adaptation and select measures for these factors, and (iii) calculate statistical relationships between factors and adaptation actions across countries. Statistically significant relationships are found between progress on adaptation and engagement in international environmental governance, national environmental governance, perception of corruption in the public sector, population size, and national wealth, as well as between responsiveness to health vulnerabilities, population size and national wealth. This analysis contributes two key early empirical findings to the growing literature concerning factors facilitating or constraining adaptation. While country size and wealth are necessary for driving higher levels of adaptation, they may be insufficient in the absence of policy commitments to environmental governance. Furthermore, governance and/or incentive frameworks for environmental governance at the national level may be an important indicator of the strength of national commitments to addressing health impacts of climate change.     

Exiting,enduring and innovating: Farm household adaptation to global zoonotic disease

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been found in 25 countries, costing billions of dollars in those affected economies, and has had profound social and environmental impacts at multiple scales of organization. As a global phenomenon, the impacts of BSE were mediated directly through the environment (animal and human health) but in Canada the indirect socioeconomic impacts of BSE were far more damaging, especially for farm households. Yet, very little research has been conducted on adaptation to the indirect impacts of global environmental change, such as those mediated through the market and governance. Our goal was to examine how farm households adapted to the Canadian BSE crisis in order to better understand rural adaptations to global zoonotic diseases and to agriculture-related global environmental change as a whole. We conducted our mixed methods research in 2004–2006. Data sources included 826 survey responses, 27 individual interviews and 12 group interviews with farmers and ranchers in western Canada. Factor analysis separated out responses into three general adaptation strategies: ‘innovating’ to pursue new opportunities; ‘enduring’ or adaptations that seek stability; and ‘exiting’ from beef production or agriculture altogether. Farm household and community level innovation was a crucial adaptive strategy in the absence of governmental and expert-based support. Enduring adaptations were important to farm household survival in the short term, yet “chronic enduring” can compromise long-term adaptive capacity. Farm exiting was highly problematic during the BSE crisis as these responses were largely unexpected and often left households more vulnerable. Government support at the farm level promoted stability, with little support provided for change-orientated adaptations. Effective farm adaptation will require support for all three types of adaptive strategies and ones that are both expert-based and grassroots in nature to enable farm households in their pursuit of pluriactive and multifunctional livelihood strategies.     

Bridging the gap: linking climate-impacts research with adaptation planning and management

A critical challenge in supporting climate change adaptation is improving the linkage between climate-impacts and vulnerability research and public and private planning and management decisions. We highlight the need for bottom-up/top-down vulnerability assessment, bringing together bottom-up knowledge of existing vulnerabilities with top-down climate-impact projections, as a transparent basis for informing decisions intended to reduce vulnerability. This approach can be used to evaluate the likelihood of crossing identified thresholds of exposure, and to evaluate alternative adaptation strategies based on their ability to reduce sensitivity to projected changes in exposure and their robustness across uncertainty in future outcomes. By identifying thresholds for which adaptive capacity is limited in particular systems, adaptation and mitigation become complements where the magnitudes of climate change at which such thresholds cluster can help to define mitigation targets.     

Farmer beliefs and concerns about climate change and attitudes toward adaptation and mitigation: Evidence from Iowa

Agriculture is both vulnerable to climate change impacts and a significant source of greenhouse gases. Increasing agriculture’s resilience and reducing its contribution to climate change are societal priorities. Survey data collected from Iowa farmers are analyzed to answer the related research questions: (1) do farmers support adaptation and mitigation actions, and (2) do beliefs and concerns about climate change influence those attitudes. Results indicate that farmers who were concerned about the impacts of climate change on agriculture and attributed it to human activities had more positive attitudes toward both adaptive and mitigative management strategies. Farmers who believed that climate change is not a problem because human ingenuity will enable adaptations and who did not believe climate change is occurring or believed it is a natural phenomenon—a substantial percentage of farmers—tended not to support mitigation.     

The role of social norms in climate adaptation: Mediating risk perception and flood insurance purchase

Flood insurance plays an important role in climate adaptation by recovering insured losses in the event of catastrophic flooding. Voluntary adoption of flood insurance has been seen as a function of risk perception that is shaped by social norms. This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between these factors. It is based on a household survey conducted in the eastern cities of Australia and involving a total of 501 randomly selected residents. Results of a path analysis show that the likelihood of having flood insurance cover was associated with perceived social norms, but not perceived flood risk. In addition, perceived norms and risk were statistically related to each other. It is concluded that social norms played a mediating role between insuring decision and risk perception. Risk perception might influence the insuring decision indirectly through shaping perception of social norms. This implies that adaptive behaviour is not necessarily a function of risk perception, but an outcome of its impacts upon the ways in which the individuals situate themselves in their social circles or the society. There is a feedback process in which individual perceptions of risk manifest as both a cause and effect, shaping and being shaped by the socio-cultural context.     

Farm-scale adaptation and vulnerability to environmental stresses: Insights from winegrowing in Northern California

The wine industry is increasingly recognized as especially vulnerable to climate change due to the climate sensitivity of both winegrape yields and quality, making it an important model system for the agricultural impacts of global changes. However, agricultural production is strongly influenced by the management decisions of growers, including their practices to modify the microclimate experienced by the growing crop; these adaptations have not been studied at the vineyard level, where managers on the ground are on the front lines of responding to global change.We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with winegrowers to examine farm-scale adaptive responses to environmental stresses, to understand the views and motivations of agricultural managers, and to explore adaptive capacity in practice. We found that growers tend to respond to stresses individually rather than collectively, except when facing severe, unfamiliar pests and diseases. Responses may be reactive or anticipatory; most anticipatory strategies have been short-term, in response to imminent threats. Growers tend to rely on their own experience to guide their management decisions, which may offer poor guidance under novel climate regimes. From using a Vulnerability Scoping Diagram, we find that changing exposure (vineyard location) and sensitivity (planting choices such as vine variety) have the biggest impact on reducing vulnerability, but that adaptations in growing or processing the crop in the vineyard and winery are easier to implement, much more commonly undertaken, and may also offer substantial adaptive capacity. Understanding the context of adaptations, as well as the decision-making processes motivating them, is important for understanding responses to global change.These findings highlight some innovations in adapting to global change, as well as some of the barriers, and point to the need for strategic investments to enhance agricultural resilience to climate change. In particular, strategies to enhance both effective and easy to implement farming adaptations, as well as broader-scale anticipatory, collective responses, could reduce vulnerability in the context of climate change.     

Vulnerability of Aboriginal health systems in Canada to climate change

Climate change has been identified as potentially the biggest health threat of the 21st century. Canada in general has a well developed public health system and low burden of health which will moderate vulnerability. However, there is significant heterogeneity in health outcomes, and health inequality is particularly pronounced among Aboriginal Canadians. Intervention is needed to prevent, prepare for, and manage climate change effects on Aboriginal health but is constrained by a limited understanding of vulnerability and its determinants. Despite limited research on climate change and Aboriginal health, however, there is a well established literature on Aboriginal health outcomes, determinants, and trends in Canada; characteristics that will determine vulnerability to climate change. In this paper we systematically review this literature, using a vulnerability framework to identify the broad level factors constraining adaptive capacity and increasing sensitivity to climate change. Determinants identified include: poverty, technological capacity constraints, socio-political values and inequality, institutional capacity challenges, and information deficit. The magnitude and nature of these determinants will be distributed unevenly within and between Aboriginal populations necessitating place-based and regional level studies to examine how these broad factors will affect vulnerability at lower levels. The study also supports the need for collaboration across all sectors and levels of government, open and meaningful dialogue between policy makers, scientists, health professionals, and Aboriginal communities, and capacity building at a local level, to plan for climate change. Ultimately, however, efforts to reduce the vulnerability of Aboriginal Canadians to climate change and intervene to prevent, reduce, and manage climate-sensitive health outcomes, will fail unless the broader determinants of socio-economic and health inequality are addressed.     

A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment — Part II: A scenario-based case study in East Anglia (UK)

Policy makers are beginning to intensify their search for policies that assist society to adapt to the unfolding impacts of climate change at the local level. This paper forms the second part of two part a examination of the potential for using scenarios in adaptation and vulnerability assessment. Part I explained how climate change and socio-economic scenarios can be integrated to better understand the complex inter-relationships between a changing climate and a dynamically evolving social system. This second part describes how a broadly representative sample of public, private and voluntary organisations in the East Anglian region of the UK responded to the scenarios, and identifies future research priorities. The main findings are that integrated socio-economic and climate scenarios applied `bottom up’ to locally important stakeholders: (1) provide a sophisticated and dynamic mechanism to explore the potential feedbacks between natural and human systems; (2) offer a means to understand the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of different exposure units; (3) promote social learning by encouraging participants to assess the adequacy of their existing climate strategies for longer than their normal planning periods.     

In government we trust? Micro-business adaptation to climate change in four post-colonial and transitional economies of China

Public expectations of government influence private action for managing climate change risks. Institutional neglect or incompetence result in a loss of trust in public institutions, consequently discouraging the public from taking added responsibility for risk management. This has been explained in terms of social contract, but evidence suggests that a politics of distrust can reinforce alternative social drivers of action, rather than displacing action. This is empirically confirmed by the present study, which examines the tendencies for adopting private protective measures across a gradient of institutional trust. Surveys were conducted in four jurisdictions within China that operate under two different political-economic systems, namely, Hong Kong and Macao (liberal market economy), and Zhuhai and Sanya (socialist market economy). Structured interviews were conducted with 569 business operators to explore how their stated adaptation practice is related to institutional trust and social capital. We found that trust predicted action only in Sanya, which is characterized by a high level of public confidence in authorities. In places of lower institutional trust, social capital became a salient and powerful driver of action. The weakening of the social contracts in Hong Kong and Macao turned their people to alternative social mechanisms. We explain the results in terms of the development trajectories, socio-political norms and institutional settings of these jurisdictions. This study provides insights into how adaptation practice can be mediated by the consequences of a change in political leadership, policy, or governance arrangements that alters the relationship of trust.     

Climate change policy responses for Canada's Inuit population: The importance of and opportunities for adaptation

We identify and examine how policy intervention can help Canada's Inuit population adapt to climate change. The policy responses are based on an understanding of the determinants of vulnerability identified in research conducted with 15 Inuit communities. A consistent approach was used in each case study where vulnerability is conceptualized as a function of exposure-sensitivity to climatic risks and adaptive capacity to deal with those risks. This conceptualization focuses on the biophysical and human determinants of vulnerability and how they are influenced by processes and conditions operating at multiple spatial-temporal scales. Case studies involved close collaboration with community members and policy makers to identify conditions to which each community is currently vulnerable, characterize the factors that shape vulnerability and how they have changed over time, identify opportunities for adaptation policy, and examine how adaptation can be mainstreamed. Fieldwork, conducted between 2006 and 2009, included 443 semi-structured interviews, 20 focus groups/community workshops, and 65 interviews with policy makers at local, regional, and national levels. Synthesizing findings consistent across the case studies we document significant vulnerabilities, a function of socio-economic stresses and change, continuing and pervasive inequality, and magnitude of climate change. Nevertheless, adaptations are available, feasible, and Inuit have considerable adaptive capacity. Realizing this adaptive capacity and overcoming adaptation barriers requires policy intervention to: (i) support the teaching and transmission of environmental knowledge and land skills, (ii) enhance and review emergency management capability, (iii) ensure the flexibility of resource management regimes, (iv) provide economic support to facilitate adaptation for groups with limited household income, (v) increase research effort to identify short and long term risk factors and adaptive response options, (vi) protect key infrastructure, and (vii) promote awareness of climate change impacts and adaptation among policy makers.     

Flood insurance arrangements in the European Union for future flood risk under climate and socioeconomic change

Flood risk will increase in many areas around the world due to climate change and increase in economic exposure. This implies that adequate flood insurance schemes are needed to adapt to increasing flood risk and to minimise welfare losses for households in flood-prone areas. Flood insurance markets may need reform to offer sufficient and affordable financial protection and incentives for risk reduction. Here, we present the results of a study that aims to evaluate the ability of flood insurance arrangements in Europe to cope with trends in flood risk, using criteria that encompass common elements of the policy debate on flood insurance reform. We show that the average risk-based flood insurance premium could double between 2015 and 2055 in the absence of more risk reduction by households exposed to flooding. We show that part of the expected future increase in flood risk could be limited by flood insurance mechanisms that better incentivise risk reduction by policyholders, which lowers vulnerability. The affordability of flood insurance can be improved by introducing the key features of public-private partnerships (PPPs), which include public reinsurance, limited premium cross-subsidisation between low- and high-risk households, and incentives for policyholder-level risk reduction. These findings were evaluated in a comprehensive sensitivity analysis and support ongoing reforms in Europe and abroad that move towards risk-based premiums and link insurance with risk reduction, strengthen purchase requirements, and engage in multi-stakeholder partnerships.