Part 1 (1/2)

Adaptation to Climate Change.

Mark Pelling.

Acknowledgements.

This book would not have been possible without the inspiration and generous exchange of ideas with colleagues, in particular: Kathleen Dill (Cornell University), Cris High (Open University), David Manuel-Navarrete (King's College London) and Michael Redclift (King's College London). Research underpinning this book was undertaken as part of three grants awarded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-221-25-0044-A, RES-228-25-0014 and RES-062-23-0367). Without this financial support the work would not have been possible. I would also like to give thanks for the many rich discussions I've enjoyed with PhD and masters students in the Department of Geography at King's College London two PhD graduates, Marco Gra.s.so and Llewellyn Leonard, have their theses referenced. Wider discussions, in particular through the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Programme led by Karen O'Brien at the University of Oslo, have also been instrumental in shaping this work. For patience beyond the call of duty I thank the Routledge editorial and print teams, in particular Andrew Mould. Special recognition is also due to Ulli Huber for creating the time and atmosphere necessary to complete this work and to Lilly Pelling for her word processing and computer management skills. Of course, the real thanks go to all those respondents who have freely given of their time and energies to provide the empirical backbone for this work, many of whom remain at the sharp end of adapting to the consequences of climate change and development failure.

Part I.

Framework and theory.

1.

The adaptation age.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3).

Climate change adaptation is an opportunity for social reform, for the questioning of values that drive inequalities in development and our unsustainable relations.h.i.+p with the environment. But this outcome is by no means certain and growing evidence suggests that too often adaptation is imagined as a non-political, technological domain and enacted in a defensive rather than a progressive spirit. Adaptation has been framed in terms of identifying what is to be preserved and what is expendable, rather than what can be reformed or gained. Dominant development discourses put the economy as first to be preserved, above cultural flouris.h.i.+ng or ecological health. There is a danger that adaptation policy and practice will be reduced to seeking the preservation of an economic core, rather than allowing it to foster the flouris.h.i.+ng of cultural and social as well as economic development, or of improved governance that seeks to incorporate the interests of future generations, non-human ent.i.ties and the marginalised.

The argument put forward in this book suggests that adaptation is a social and political act; one intimately linked to contemporary, and with the possibility for re-shaping future, power relations in society. But it also recognises that different actors perceive contrasting roles for adaptation. That there may be multiple ways of adapting is already recognised in the literature through the range of different scopes and timings for adaptive interventions (for example, Smit et al., 2000; Smit and Wandel, 2006). These are important technical considerations but more emphasis is needed on the underlying socio-political choices that are made through the selection of adaptation pathways. Here we propose three such pathways leading to resilience (maintaining the status quo), transition (incremental change) and transformation (radical change). No one pathway necessarily leads to 'progressive' or more equitable and efficient outcomes than the others. The evaluation of pathways and subsequent outcomes will be a function of context and the viewpoint of individual actors. Opening a.n.a.lysis of how it is that individual adaptive pathways come to dominate or be marginalised is one of the aims of this book, which offers theoretical and empirical exploration.

Recent experience suggests that consensus on a progressive adaptation will not be easy. Our current age of adaptation is the second time in recent history that a global environmental challenge has provided an opportunity to question dominant forms of development. The first, coalescing around the notion of sustainable development, has (to date) manifestly failed. The international roots of the sustainable development agenda lay in a concern that the environmental limits to economic growth were fast approaching. Indeed the combination of mitigation and adaptation agendas represents a reprise of the sustainable development agenda, and climate change a strong signal that existing developments are far from sustainable (Le Blanc, 2009). Underlining the significance of adaptation for sustainable development, Adger et al. (2009a) remind us that climate change adaptation decisions have justice consequences across as well as within generations.

The first mainstream expression of a sustainable development approach was the Brundtland Commission, 1983, which stimulated a search for radical ecological and social alternatives to development (Redclift, 1987). These peaked in public awareness at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1992. Here, differences in the prioritising of development and environment between rich and poorer nations and the influence of a strong industry lobby limited reform at the international level. The parallels with current challenges facing international negotiations at the UNFCCC are striking. The policy legacy of UNCED has been a constrained version of sustainable development largely restricted to ecological modernisation and an acceptance of the subst.i.tutability of environmental for economic value (Pelling, 2007a). Where some success has been achieved through this process it is outside of the compromised domain of international politics through the innovations of civil society groups, fair trade companies and concerned individuals, where environmental and social justice goals have been brought into projects for economic development (Adams, 2008). But these initiatives remain fragmented and overwhelmed by the global policy consensus.

Can climate change adaptation reinvigorate these debates and provide an impetus for stronger sustainable development action? Might climate change adaptation be both a reprise of sustainable development and a new opportunity in its own right? The origins of the UNFCCC process lie partly in UNCED where the first Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement was opened for signature. This connection to debates on sustainable development also reminds us that climate change and resultant adaptation are but one expression of an underlying crisis in environmentsociety relations.h.i.+ps. The deepest root causes of climate change and the inability of those with power in society (locally and globally) to act lie in the dominant processes and values of the political economy that increasingly concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, with unjust social and environmental externalities as accepted. At this level climate change risk is but one expression of a deeper social malaise in modern society. For the poor, comfortable and rich alike aspiring and acquiring in order to consume have become the rationale for development; a rationale propelled as much by fear of failure as the pleasures of consumption. Can the burgeoning academic and policy interest in adaptation be levers to address these deeper questions of sustainability and justice, as well as adjusting to meet the more proximate risks presented to us by a changing climate?

Here we propose and ill.u.s.trate a framework to help reveal and understand the social, cultural and political pathways through which adaptation to climate change unfolds. Adaptation is conceptualised through three layers of a.n.a.lysis (Chapters 35) which build from a starting point in the notion of resilience to encompa.s.s adaptation as a process of socio-political transition and transformation. Each stage of theoretical a.n.a.lysis brings together work from systems theory with a wider literature including regime a.n.a.lysis, discourse, risk society, human security and the social contract. This reflects the strong influence of systems thinking on adaptation work but also enables the theoretical precision derived from systems thinking for example, on social learning and self-organisation to run throughout the book while bringing to the fore power, which is more ably addressed through other theoretical discourses. These theoretical discussions are then ill.u.s.trated through three case study chapters showing how adaptation can unfold through contested politics in organisations, urban systems and nation states.

Power lies at the heart of this conceptualisation of adaptation. Power asymmetries determine for whom, where and when the impacts of climate change are felt, and the scope for recovery. The power held by an actor in a social system, translated into a stake for upholding the status quo, also plays a great role in shaping an actor's support or resistance towards adaptation or the building of adaptive capacity when this has implications for change in social, economic, cultural or political relations, or in the ways natural a.s.sets are viewed and used. Accepting that adaptation is contested makes interpreting adaptation as progressive hostage to the observer's viewpoint. This requires the imposition of a normative framework to provide a consistent and transparent positionality for a.n.a.lysis. Here we are guided by Rawls' theory of justice that identifies procedural (inclusion in decision-making) and distributional (social and spatial) elements. Rawls (1971, see also Paavola et al., 2006) prioritises human rights over public goods; holds the social contract between citizens and the state in dynamic tension so that it is liable to capture by vested interests at moments of pressure; and argues that society should be governed by principles that protect inclusive governance and seek to enhance the quality of life of the poorest. This final statement is perhaps the most important for making judgements on comparative adaptation pathways.

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 inst.i.tutional 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sociated 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.

Adapting to climate change.

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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sociated 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 const.i.tutes 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociated 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.

The idea of adaptation.

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 a.s.sessment of the influence of the IPCCUNFCCC 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 IPCCUNFCCC frame.