Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation Read Online Free Page B

contextualised with the other risks (social, economic and political as well as environmental) that shape and limit human well being and the functioning of socio-ecological systems (Pelling and Wisner, 2009). This is the difference between an economic analysis of the farming sector of a country, and understanding the competing choices that shape adaptive capacity and actions for an individual farmer put in the context of the markets and regulatory regimes within which the farmer operates. Both are useful but partial lenses. The overlapping of seasonal and other climatic cycles with variation in baseline climate change and extremes makes it very difficult for specific events to separate out climate change signals from background weather patterns. Both short-term uncertainty in variability and extremes and long-term trends need to be considered (Adger and Brooks, 2003).
     
Who or what adapts?
    Initial work on assessing who or what adapts came from the assessment of regional or national scale agro-economic systems. For example, Krankina
et al.
(1997) refer to boreal forestry management strategies as a means of assisting forests adapt. Here the system of interest was ecological and the management system an intervening variable between it and climate change. This kind of work complements well the scale of resolution available from climate modelling and the existing understanding of ecological adaptation within agricultural sciences, but is less suited to explore well the social processes driving and limiting adaptive decision-making. Economic assessment has also operated well at this scale, seeking to identify the costs (and benefits) of climate change scenarios for agricultural systems and to varying extents factoring in human adaptation. In a review of the economics of climate change literature, Stanton
et al
. (2008) observe the narrow framing used to approach decision making for climate change policy. Harvey (2010) goes further, arguing that a new macro-economic vision is needed to help move past the internal contradiction of contemporary economics that promotes energy intensive growth and so accelerates climate change with consequent growth inhibiting outcomes. Contemporary incentives push for greater and greater economic growth in an attempt to grow our way out of climate change and its attendant risks. The extraction and concentration of wealth that results increases collective vulnerability while simultaneously accelerating climate change associated (and other environments) hazards.
    More human-centred analyses have also flourished which seek to identify the human and social characteristics that determine the capacity of communities to face a shock or stress (Adger
et al
., 2005a). Local viewpoints help to contextualise adaptation within development and explain why people are unable or unwilling to take adaptive action (helping to identify the limits to climate change adaptation). From an analysis of two communities in Puerto Rico, Lopez-Marrero and Yarnal (2010) found that concerns for health conditions, family well being, economic factors and land tenure were given more priority by local actors than adaptation to climate change, despite their exposure to flooding and hurricanes. The results show the importance of addressing adaptation within the context of multiple risks, and of people’s general well being.
How does adaptation occur?
    The diversity of work examining processes of adaptation has benefited from a number of typologies of adaptive action and their coherent synthesis, see Smit
et al.
(2000), Smit and Wandel (2006), Burton
et al.
(2007). Carter
et al.
(1994) distinguished between autonomous (automatic, spontaneous or passive adaptations) that occur as part of the routine of a social system, and planned (strategic or active) adaptations. Smit
et al.
(2000) also add that adaptations may occur unintentionally as an incidental outcome of other actions – further emphasising the importance of contextualising