Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation Read Online Free Page A
Author: Mark Pelling
Tags: Development Studies
actors be expected to embrace adaptation as anything other than resilience – acts to reinforce the status quo? Indeed should they be encouraged to do so? Asserting more radical change in social and political systems needs to come from below through the actions of people at risk building on existing social and political reform movements.
With the costs of climate change increasing and adaptation being increasingly demanded, meeting the funding gap for adaptation in the short term is a key
Figure 1.1
Global distribution of vulnerability to climate change. Combined national indices of exposure and sensitivity
(Source: Yohe
et al.
, 2006)
challenge. Without additional and earmarked funds for adaptation there is a risk of money being forced from existing overseas development assistance (ODA) budgets. ODA finance is already being squeezed by increased recent demand for humanitarian and disaster reconstruction funding (White
et al
., 2004). Agrawala (2005) has estimated that between 15–60 per cent of official development assistance (ODA) flows will be affected by climate change. This trend is a particular tragedy as ODA is a key mechanism for reducing generic vulnerability to disaster risk and climate change impacts as well as achieving broader human security goals. A range of proposals exists for identifying additional funds. Oxfam (2008) proposes that funding be generated from auctioning a fraction of emissions allocations to developed countries under the post-2012 agreement, including proposed new emissions-trading for international aviation and shipping. Other proposals include increasing the share of the Clean Development Mechanism contributing to adaptation and increasing the role played by private capital through venture capital or commercial loans.
Conceptual development
Since its reintroduction into social scientific and policy debates following the Rio Summit, the interests of different analysis have made adaptation a slippery concept. For some, adaptation’s contribution would best be as a tightly defined, technical term (like mitigation in the existing UNFCCC documentation) that can add universal clarity to policy formation including at the international level (for example, Schipper and Burton, 2009). Others, who see adaptation not as a technical category but as a research field, tend to have a wider view. Fankhauser (1998) suggests that adaptation can be synonymous with sustainable development. This challenge was noted as early as 1994 by Burton, just two years after the Rio Summit, and the plethora of interpretations has continued to grow as individual disciplines and intellectual communities have invested adaptation with their own worldviews (Kane and Yohe, 2007).
The adaptation to climate change debate is driven by four questions:
• What to adapt to?
• Who or what adapts?
• How does adaptation occur?
• What are the limits to adaptation?
None of these questions have easy answers.
What to adapt to?
Climate change itself is agreed to be manifest in at least three interacting and overlapping ways: climate change has come to encompass long-term trends in mean temperatures and other climatic norms, importantly precipitation, and secondary effects like sea-level rise together with variability about these norms from inter-seasonal to periods of a decade with particular implications for infrastructure planning, agriculture and human health, and extremes in variability that can trigger natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, fires and so on (IPCC 2007). Furthermore, local studies of adaptation make it increasingly clear that while international and national policy makers may seek a clear measurement of impacts and adaptation associated with climate change – the incremental costs of mitigating or adapting to climate change, as the Global Environmental Facility puts it (Labbate, 2008) – on the ground, any meaningful measurement of adaptation needs to accept climate change is
With the costs of climate change increasing and adaptation being increasingly demanded, meeting the funding gap for adaptation in the short term is a key
Figure 1.1
Global distribution of vulnerability to climate change. Combined national indices of exposure and sensitivity
(Source: Yohe
et al.
, 2006)
challenge. Without additional and earmarked funds for adaptation there is a risk of money being forced from existing overseas development assistance (ODA) budgets. ODA finance is already being squeezed by increased recent demand for humanitarian and disaster reconstruction funding (White
et al
., 2004). Agrawala (2005) has estimated that between 15–60 per cent of official development assistance (ODA) flows will be affected by climate change. This trend is a particular tragedy as ODA is a key mechanism for reducing generic vulnerability to disaster risk and climate change impacts as well as achieving broader human security goals. A range of proposals exists for identifying additional funds. Oxfam (2008) proposes that funding be generated from auctioning a fraction of emissions allocations to developed countries under the post-2012 agreement, including proposed new emissions-trading for international aviation and shipping. Other proposals include increasing the share of the Clean Development Mechanism contributing to adaptation and increasing the role played by private capital through venture capital or commercial loans.
Conceptual development
Since its reintroduction into social scientific and policy debates following the Rio Summit, the interests of different analysis have made adaptation a slippery concept. For some, adaptation’s contribution would best be as a tightly defined, technical term (like mitigation in the existing UNFCCC documentation) that can add universal clarity to policy formation including at the international level (for example, Schipper and Burton, 2009). Others, who see adaptation not as a technical category but as a research field, tend to have a wider view. Fankhauser (1998) suggests that adaptation can be synonymous with sustainable development. This challenge was noted as early as 1994 by Burton, just two years after the Rio Summit, and the plethora of interpretations has continued to grow as individual disciplines and intellectual communities have invested adaptation with their own worldviews (Kane and Yohe, 2007).
The adaptation to climate change debate is driven by four questions:
• What to adapt to?
• Who or what adapts?
• How does adaptation occur?
• What are the limits to adaptation?
None of these questions have easy answers.
What to adapt to?
Climate change itself is agreed to be manifest in at least three interacting and overlapping ways: climate change has come to encompass long-term trends in mean temperatures and other climatic norms, importantly precipitation, and secondary effects like sea-level rise together with variability about these norms from inter-seasonal to periods of a decade with particular implications for infrastructure planning, agriculture and human health, and extremes in variability that can trigger natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, fires and so on (IPCC 2007). Furthermore, local studies of adaptation make it increasingly clear that while international and national policy makers may seek a clear measurement of impacts and adaptation associated with climate change – the incremental costs of mitigating or adapting to climate change, as the Global Environmental Facility puts it (Labbate, 2008) – on the ground, any meaningful measurement of adaptation needs to accept climate change is
Readers choose
J. R. Rain
Crista McHugh
Graham Greene
Glenn Douglass
Sasha Campbell
Jessica Sims
Fernando Pessoa
Charlaine Harris
Lindsay Paige, Mary Smith
Celia Rivenbark