Multiple exposures and dynamic vulnerability: Evidence from the grape industry in the Okanagan Valley, Canada

This paper assesses the vulnerability of grape growers and winery operators in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia to climate variability and change, in the context of other sources of risk. Through interviews and focus groups, producers identified the climatic and non-climatic risks relevant to them and the strategies employed to manage these risks. The results show that the presence of multiple exposures affects the way in which producers are vulnerable to climate change. Producers are vulnerable to conditions that not only affect crop yield, but also affect their ability to compete in or sell to the market. Their sensitivity to these conditions is influenced in part by institutional factors such as trade liberalization and a “markup-free delivery” policy. Producers’ ability to adapt or cope with these risks varies depending on such factors as the availability of resources and technology, and access to government programmes. Producers will likely face challenges associated with the supply of water for irrigation due to a combination of climatic changes and changing demographics in the Okanagan Valley, which in turn affect their ability to adapt to climatic conditions. Finally, adaptations made by producers can change the nature of the operation and its vulnerability, demonstrating the dynamic nature of vulnerability.     

Linking vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience science to practice: Pathways, players, and partnerships

Vulnerability, adaptation and resilience are concepts that are finding increasing currency in several fields of research as well as in various policy and practitioner communities engaged in global environmental change science, climate change, sustainability science, disaster risk-reduction and famine interventions. As scientists and practitioners increasingly work together in this arena a number of questions are emerging: What is credible, salient and legitimate knowledge, how is this knowledge generated and how is it used in decision making? Drawing on important science in this field, and including a case study from southern Africa, we suggest an alternative mode of interaction to the usual one-way interaction between science and practice often used. In this alternative approach, different experts, risk-bearers, and local communities are involved and knowledge and practice is contested, co-produced and reflected upon. Despite some successes in the use and negotiation of such knowledge for ‘real’ world issues, a number of problems persist that require further investigation including the difficulties of developing consensus on the methodologies used by a range of stakeholders usually across a wide region (as the case study of southern Africa shows, particularly in determining and identifying vulnerable groups, sectors, and systems); slow delivery of products that could enhance resilience to change that reflects not only a lack of data, and need for scientific credibility, but also the time-consuming process of coming to a negotiated understanding in science–practice interactions and, finally, the need to clarify the role of ‘external’ agencies, stakeholders, and scientists at the outset of the dialogue process and subsequent interactions. Such factors, we argue, all hinder the use of vulnerability and resilience ‘knowledge’ that is being generated and will require much more detailed investigation by both producers and users of such knowledge.     

The PISA grammar decodes diverse human–environment approaches

Human–environment interactions are studied by several groups of scholars who have elaborated different approaches to describe, analyze, and explain these interactions, and eventually propose paths for management. The SETER project (Socio-Ecological Theories and Empirical Research) analyzed and compared how “flag-holders” of distinct school of thought in human–environment scholarship approached a number of empirical problems of environmental management. This paper presents the findings from this experiment by concentrating on how representatives of four schools of thought approached one of these case studies: the plant health crisis in greenhouse tomato production in south of France. Our analysis suggests that these approaches share a common conceptual vocabulary composed of four explanatory elements of change (Power, Incentives, System and Adaptation-PISA). We argue that what distinguishes these schools from one another is the syntax—the “rules” by which researchers in each of the sub-disciplines tend to organize the components of this shared conceptual vocabulary. In other words, the schools under scrutiny are differentiated not so much by what they speak of, but rather in what order, or hierarchy, do they tend to rank the importance and/or the sequence of each of these concepts in human–environment explanations. The results of our experiment support the view that communication and cooperation across the diverse human–environment traditions is possible and productive. At the same time, however, we argue that it is the distinctiveness of the claims yielded by these different schools of thought that augment our collective understanding of complex socio-ecological problems. Attempts to integrate these perspectives in one unitary approach would undermine the intellectual wealth necessary to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.     

Local collective action: Adaptation to coastal erosion in the Monkey River Village,Belize

Successful adaptation to environmental change and variability is closely connected with social groups’ ability to act collectively, but many social-ecological challenges exceed local adaptive capacity which necessitate assistance from governmental institutions. Few studies have investigated how local collective action can be used to enrol external support for adaptation. This paper reduces this research gap by analysing a locally driven adaptation process in response to coastal erosion in Monkey River Village, Belize. Drawing on literature on adaptation and political ecology, we examine the different strategies the local residents have used over time to influence government authorities to support them in curbing the coastal erosion. Our findings show that the local mobilisation generated government support for a temporary sea defence and that collective strategies emerge as a response to threats to a place specific way of life. Our case illustrates that it was essential that the villagers could ally with journalists, researchers and local NGOs to make their claims for protection heard by the government. The paper contributes to adaptation research by arguing that local collective action, seen as contestation over rights to protection from environmental change, can be a means for places and communities not prioritised by formal policies to enrol external support for adaptation. Our study supports and adds to the perspective that attention to formal arrangements such as adaptation policy alone has limited explanatory power to understand collective responses to change.     

Climate change transformation: A definition and typology to guide decision making in urban environments

Climate change presents a threat to the sustainability of cities and their societies, and must be adequately addressed. Urban environments (cities) are responsible for the creation of a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions which are the source of climate change. Cities have been increasingly the focus of action to address climate change, yet emissions are not significantly reducing. Additionally, there a lack of integration between adaptation and mitigation. This prevents responses adequate to limit global warming to 1.5^OC, and to be well adapted to anticipated changes. This paper critically analyses existing definitions and typologies of climate change actions. A definition of ‘climate change transformation’ is proposed which includes the integration of adaptation and mitigation goals to enable a new regime in which global warming is limited to 1.5^OC. A new three-part typology: ‘coping, malaction and transformation,’ is presented for categorising climate change actions by the extent to which they integrate adaptation and mitigation, and define a new regime. The typology is accompanied by illustrations to demonstrate the relationship between adaptation and mitigation. The definition, typology and illustration serve to guide effective climate change decision making, and provides principles to guide application in urban environments.     

Differentiating capacities as a means to sustainable climate change adaptation

There are two forms of capacity to adapt to global change: those associated with fundamental human development goals (generic capacity), and those necessary for managing and reducing specific climatic threats (specific). We argue that these two domains of capacity must be addressed explicitly, simultaneously and iteratively if climate change adaptation and sustainable development goals are to be attained. We propose a simple heuristic to understand the four main ways these two capacities interact, leading to more or less desirable outcomes. Drawing from three case studies of agricultural adaptation to climatic risk (Phoenix, AZ; Northeast Brazil; Chiapas, Mexico) we argue that the institutional context of adaptation can implicitly or explicitly undermine one form of capacity with repercussions for the development of the other. A better and more strategic balance of generic and specific capacities is needed if the promised synergies between sustainable development and adaptation are to be achieved.     

Adaptation and pathways of change and response: A case study from Eastern Europe

There are increasing calls for conceptualizing adaptation as future pathways as a foresight tool for adaptation planning and implementation. To assist understanding of future adaptation pathways, this paper used ethnographic approaches to understand past pathways of response to major social and political change over the last seven decades in a rural Transylvanian community. The results identified five main socio-ethnic groups that had different pathways of response to key periods of change. These periods provided different constraints and opportunities, and shaped the accumulation and loss of different categories of assets for each socio-ethnic group. Findings show that adaptation is an ongoing process in which responses and decisions are patterned along multiple, socially contingent trajectories with continuities and legacies. Importantly, while the different groups had interrelated pathways, these were associated with a powerful normative pathway that was implicated in producing and reinforcing local social hierarchies. In this case, the normative pathway was a mix of practicing subsistence agriculture and small scale flexible income generation. The nuanced understanding of the change and response dynamics in the village provide important insights for anticipating responses to, and the impacts of, future change. It also highlights the need for holistic and multi-perspective approaches when developing and implementing adaptation pathways. These approaches should responsibly and carefully consider the implications of particular future paths for all concerned, but especially for those that are the most marginalized in society.     

Developing local adaptation strategies for climate change in agriculture: A priority-setting approach with application to Latin America

Even with substantially increased attention to climate adaptation in developing countries in recent years, there are a number of important remaining research needs: better incorporating stakeholder input; using replicable methodologies to provide comparability across different settings; assuring that stakeholder input reflects the results of climate science, not simply perceptions; and effectively linking stakeholder input with the regional and national levels at which policy changes are made. This study reports the results of a methodology for identifying and prioritizing local, stakeholder-driven response options to climate change in agriculture. The approach is based on multi-criteria scoring methods previously applied to research planning and priority-setting in agricultural and natural resource management research, public health, and other areas. The methodology is a sequential approach built around needs assessments by local stakeholders; the incorporation of climate science results; the sharing of these results and climate adaption response options with stakeholders at a series of workshops; stakeholder priority-setting exercises using multi-criteria scoring; and validation with policymakers. The application is to three diverse agroecosystems in Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Among the many findings is that, notwithstanding the wide diversity of agro-ecosystems, there are numerous similarities in the agricultural adaptation responses prioritized by local stakeholders.     

The art of adaptation: Living with climate change in the rural American Southwest

As adaptation has come to the forefront in climate change discourse, research, and policy, it is crucial to consider the effects of how we interpret the concept. This paper draws attention to the need for interpretations that foster policies and institutions with the breadth and flexibility to recognize and support a wide range of locally relevant adaptation strategies. Social scientists have argued that, in practice, the standard definition of adaptation tends to prioritize economic over other values and technical over social responses, draw attention away from underlying causes of vulnerability and from the broader context in which adaptive responses take place, and exclude discussions of inequality, justice, and transformation. In this paper, we discuss an alternate understanding of adaptation, which we label “living with climate change,” that emerged from an ethnographic study of how rural residents of the U.S. Southwest understand, respond to, and plan for weather and climate in their daily lives, and we consider how it might inform efforts to develop a more comprehensive definition. The discussion brings into focus several underlying features of this lay conception of adaptation, which are crucial for understanding how adaptation actually unfolds on the ground: an ontology based on nature–society mutuality; an epistemology based on situated knowledge; practice based on performatively adjusting human activities to a dynamic biophysical and social environment; and a placed-based system of values. We suggest that these features help point the way toward a more comprehensive understanding of climate change adaptation, and one more fully informed by the understanding that we are living in the Anthropocene.     

我国沿海城市应对气候变化的发展战略

我国沿海地区战略地位十分重要,并呈现“区域发展沿海化,沿海城市临海化”的趋势,但同时却面临着全球气候变化引起的海平面上升、极端气候灾害频发等诸多严峻挑战。为在战略层面解决我国向海发展的战略与全球气候变化的矛盾与冲突,文中提出了我国沿海城市应对气候变化的发展战略：确定了总体目标是建设适合我国国情的沿海气候弹性城市,提出了“规划引领、陆海统筹、主动适应、积极减排、适度冗余、增加弹性”的应对原则,明确了强化城市规划管控、控制空间发展方向、严控围填海造地、优化城市空间布局、提高规划设计标准、加强海岸防护设施、夯实城市基础设施和提升监测预警应急等8项重点任务。