Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 75
5
Climate Change Adaptation:
The State of the Science
INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS:
WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES, CONCEPTS, AND DEFINITIONS
Roger Kasperson
Roger Kasperson, the panel chair, opened the workshop by noting that
its goal is not to develop a research agenda, but rather to identify some
areas in which the social and behavioral sciences already know enough
to be helpful in developing societal responses to climate change. He noted
that the workshop organizers had circulated a series of critical questions
they would like the workshop to contribute to answering (see Box II-1).
He described the planned organization of the workshop. First, it will assess
the current state of knowledge. Second, it will discuss some of the efforts
to address the issues through federal policy. Third, it will examine a series
of case studies in several panel discussions. Last, the workshop participants
will return to the initial questions and consider whether the community has
any answers. Kasperson stated that he might be the most skeptical person
about whether the adaptation community knows as much as it needs to
know to assist societal efforts in this domain. He hopes the workshop can
separate what is known from what participants would like to know.
With respect to the relationship between science and decision making,
Kasperson noted that there are two main metaphors. One is of a bridge,
a pipeline, or a superhighway between science and practice. However,
research and experience suggest that what exists looks more like a spider
web, with multiple centers that move around. In Washington, people talk
OCR for page 76
6 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
FIGURE 5-1 A hypothetical web representing the relationships of science and deci-
sion making.
NOTE: DM = decision making.
SOURCE: Roger Kasperson. Used with permission.
repeatedly about a linear process that starts with the science and then ap-
plies values at the end of a management process (if any funds still remain).
Kasperson said that the process is actually much messier. He presented a
hypothetical schematic to represent the metaphor of a web (see Figure 5-1).
Webs may be expected to take very different forms for different cases. In-
sights and ideas come out of science and go through a process of mediation
by many diverse actors, with some of them disappearing and others being
elevated in importance before decision makers ultimately act.
There are simple webs, with strong linkages of science and decision
making through what have been called boundary organizations. Some
webs are complex and stable; others are dynamic and unstable, with actors
appearing and disappearing. A complex and unstable web is probably de-
scriptive of climate policy—and there is limited understanding of the shape
or functioning of such webs.
OCR for page 77
CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
ADDRESSING STRATEGIC AND INTEGRATION
CHALLENGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
Ian Burton (with the assistance of Thea Dickinson)
Meteorological Service of Canada and University of Toronto
Ian Burton began by observing that the topic of adaptation to everyday
climate has been around for a long time under different guises. Adaptation
to anthropogenic climate change is another matter. The short version of the
story begins with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change, signed in 1992, which put adaptation to climate change onto
the public agenda. Because that convention was focused on greenhouse
gas emissions, it emphasized pollution control and mitigation, following
the model used for addressing ozone depletion in the Montreal protocol.
Thus, the scientists who advised politicians focused attention on pollution
control. However, the developing countries that considered themselves most
at risk and least responsible insisted that adaptation be written into the
convention, and rich nations agreed to contribute to the costs. The problem
was defined as adaptation to climate change, as opposed to adaptation to
climate, and this distinction has hung up discussion ever since. The most
recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (Parry et
al., 2007) defined adaptation in terms of “adjustment.”
In this short story, adaptation to climate change was born in 1992 and
was initially of concern to developing countries, which hoped for additional
development assistance as a result. That perspective led to a lot of research
on adaptation to climate change. The knowledge base can be defined
broadly to include all of social science knowledge on the subject. There is
a much longer tradition of research on adaptation to climate change in the
global South than on adaptation in the rich countries.
Policy developments on adaptation since 1992 include these milestones.
The Kyoto protocol, adopted in 1997, imposed a 2 percent levy on agree-
ments under the clean development mechanism to support adaptation. The
Marrakesh accords of 2001 called for national adaptation plans of action
in the 49 least developed countries. By the 2007 Bali conference, four “pil-
lars” of climate response were identified: (1) mitigation, (2) adaptation, (3)
technology transfer, and (4) finance. At the Copenhagen meeting in 2009,
there was a promise of substantial additional funding for adaptation and
mitigation in developing countries, up to $3 billion (U.S.) by 2012 and
$100 billion per annum by 2020. One might reasonably ask whether there
is any real chance that these promises will be kept.
Meanwhile, there has been little progress on mitigation. Mitigation is
now recognized as a problem of emerging economies as well as in the global
North. There also has been a belated realization that developed countries
OCR for page 78
FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
share the risks of climate change. The earlier idea that mitigation is global
but adaptation is local has collapsed. It is now widely recognized that ad-
aptation needs national and international cooperation to succeed. Climate
change also has been recognized as an issue of development and equity, not
only a pollution issue.
Synthesizing a statement of the knowledge base is certainly part of
the way forward. But there is also a longer version of the story. Moving
forward can start by looking back. The knowledge base did not start in
1992: when the idea of climate change adaptation became a focus of policy
attention in 1992, the existing disaster risk management community was
astonished and said it already had a lot to say. Much of the research in this
area has been reviewed by Dennis Mileti in Disasters by Design (Mileti,
1999). As far back as 1945, Gilbert White said that while floods are acts of
God, flood losses are the results of human choice. There was a great deal
of knowledge about adaptation to climate before 1992, but most of it was
based on the assumption of a stationary climate. There has been a systemic
failure to deal with climate extremes as well as society could and should,
even before climate change came into the picture.
Climate variability and extremes had been considered in terms of
events, from which social systems recover and return to normal; now
sequences of events are considered, such as progressive series of droughts
or floods or cyclones, as well as cumulative desiccation and sea level rise,
rather than just isolated droughts and storms. This change in view has led
to more of a focus on systemic risks and to thinking in longer terms about
risk reduction rather than only about assistance for recovery. Disasters once
were considered as humanitarian concerns to be dealt with one at a time;
now there is an emerging idea that the recurrence of disasters is expectable
and that they are a common responsibility. The two communities are now
coming together.
There is a deficit in attention to adaptation, even in wealthy countries.
Despite the expansion of physical science knowledge, disaster losses are
increasing globally. Efforts at natural hazards management, human adjust-
ment, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation have not been
successful. Can knowledge be better marshaled to address the adaptation
deficit?
Burton suggested talking about forensic disaster studies, asking,Who or
what is responsible for disaster losses? Responsibility is widely dispersed.
Rich people choose amenities over risk reduction, the poor often have little
choice, and government assistance to victims of disasters can create moral
hazards. What is known about flood insurance, and is there a credible as-
sessment of how it works? A research proposal to look at this topic is be-
ing sent to the International Congress of Scientific Unions and to national
research councils. The research would look at climate risks the same way
OCR for page 79
CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
that transportation analyses look at the causes of traffic accidents, to pin
down responsibility. Perhaps this kind of analysis can be done for stationary
climate, and then climate change can be added.
Burton ended by saying that there are many challenges. Adaptation is
local, but also regional, national, and global. It is multisectoral, so all the
sectors must be part of any national adaptation strategy. An interagency
task force may not be sufficient to address the problem, and a more inte-
grated approach may be required. He reminded the audience not to forget
mitigation. Adaptation choices may have important near-term benefits by
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generating other desired outcomes.
They may also have adverse long-run consequences, including increased
emissions.
ADDRESSING BARRIERS AND SOCIAL CHALLENGES
OF CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
Neil Adger1
University of East Anglia
Neil Adger addressed three issues: (1) the roles of the multiple actors
that are adapting, from civil society to markets and government; (2) equity
issues related to who is vulnerable and who makes adaptation decisions;
and (3) barriers and limitations to implementation of adaptation measures.
In looking at the future, people not only use scenarios and models but also
observe adaptation and make inferences from past adaptations to variabil-
ity in weather and climate. They can also learn from observing ongoing
adaptations to anticipated climate change.
The United Kingdom (UK) provides some good examples. There are
efforts to build adaptive capacity, to regulate land and water for future
use, and to implement some adaptive actions (e.g., coastal defense, as in the
protecting the Thames estuary against anticipated risks to 2100). Actuaries
are calculating insurance premiums for the future. There are also efforts to
provide public good information to stakeholders through the UK Climate
Impacts Programme. The UK Department of Health is doing planning for
heat waves.
In 2005, the Tyndall Centre identified 300 examples of adaptation—
mostly in governments at different levels, but many in the private sector as
well. Government in the United Kingdom is in the vanguard of adaptation.
If there are best practices in government or the private sector, however, it is
1 The presentation is available at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/hdgc/Addressing%20
Barriers%20and%20Social%20Challenges%20of%20Climate%20Change%20Adaption.pdf
[accessed September 2010].
OCR for page 80
0 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
not yet clear if they get diffused. In fact, so far there are no assessment cri-
teria for judging whether these adaptation efforts were effective. Research
on diffusion of technology may offer models that can show how widespread
the diffusion of adaptation will be. The issues affecting implementation of
adaptation are cost, timing, power, responsibility, equity, and irreversibility
of impacts (see Table 5-1). An obvious question is whether the first focus
should be on trying to diffuse practices or on making sure they are effec-
tive. Generally, anticipation is believed to cost less than adaptation after
the fact.
Adger noted that resilience and vulnerability are not antonyms. He
distinguished three normative goals or principles for government interven-
tion: protecting the most vulnerable (Rawls), efficient adaptation (Pareto
optimality), and system resilience (rather than a focus on individual parts).
He pointed out that if an ecological system is moving from one state to
another, resilience could have a number of different end states. The idea
of measuring vulnerability presumes a threshold of risk beyond which a
population is vulnerable. There may be parts of a population that are vul-
TABLE 5-1 Decision-Making Questions
Issue Key Question Outcome of Indecision
Cost Who bears the costs of Costs may be shared unevenly in
adaptation? terms of willingness or ability to
pay
Timing When is action taken? Anticipatory adaptation may be
cheaper: ex post recovery has
greater social costs
Power Who makes the decisions? Inaction or stalemate between
advocates of national and local
views
Responsibility Who takes action? Responsibility inevitably devolved
to individuals
Equity What kinds of change are Unacceptable risks are imposed on
acceptable? the least powerful people and on
public or private infrastructure
Irreversibility How are irreversible impacts Increased economic cost of future
considered? options lost; asymmetry in loss
aversion
SOURCE: Amended from Tompkins et al. (2008, Table 2). Used with permssion.
OCR for page 81
1
CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
nerable and a proportion that is not. If so, it makes sense to concentrate
on the vulnerable proportion of the population. It is possible to measure
vulnerability by the proportion of a population that is vulnerable or by the
distance of people from the threshold.
Social science has a lot to say about vulnerability, but Adger questioned
whether there will be the luxury of time. Fairly radical adaptation is likely
to be necessary. He noted a new realism about the need to plan for adapta-
tion to a greatly changed climate. He also noted that adaptation may be
limited because people have diverse and incommensurable values, because
foresight is uncertain, and because people place intrinsic value on current
places and identities. Adaptation is also constrained by social characteris-
tics, individual behavior, and other barriers.
Adger spoke about the potential and limitations of markets for re-
sponding to climate change. Critical adaptation needs concern water re-
sources, property loss, human health, nature conservation, and cultural
heritage. Markets might solve problems at the top of this list, where they
work fairly well, but less so further down in the list. Citing work by Farber
(2007), Adger said that markets work better for “geographic” impacts—
water, coasts, habitats—but not well for diffuse impacts (e.g., on global
food systems) or for catastrophic climate changes at the global level. The
issues that limit markets are those that involve social externalities (effects
on communities or places) and loss of nonmaterial assets.
The perceptions of the vulnerable affect the ability to adapt. Research
by Adger and colleagues (Abrahamson et al., 2009; Wolf et al., 2010) has
found that among elderly people in the United Kingdom who are vulnerable
to heat waves, low self-efficacy reduces action to adapt. For elderly people
living alone, their ability to live independently was important to them, and
many denied their vulnerability by denying that they are elderly. He pointed
out that heat wave planning will not work if targeted to the vulnerable, if
they deny that they are vulnerable.
Adger noted as well that many communities will resist planning for cli-
mate change and instead will actively lobby for protection against it. Some
UK coastal communities, for example, actively resist sensible plans for
adaptation. What matters to them is control over the process of planning
their community’s response. Well-functioning property markets may create
incentives to adapt by devaluing vulnerable properties, but adaptation still
will not be easy because of community identity and other issues.
Adger identified three emerging issues: (1) Can people learn about
planning to adapt from coping with crises? (2) Individual perceptions of
resilience and vulnerability are drivers of social processes of adaptation. (3)
Social inertia in the form of strong attachments to the past or to current
conditions can be a significant barrier to adaptation.
OCR for page 82
2 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
DISCUSSION
In comments at the end of the session, Anthony Janetos mentioned a
Heinz Center report on what is known about flood insurance. He said that
the U.S. national flood insurance program is nothing like what the industry
would create; it is more of an income distribution program. Helen Ingram
asked about how to shift the focus from particular disasters to the larger,
systemic picture. Ashwini Chhatre asked about current maladaptations
that need to be undone, such as property development on the Florida coast
and irrigation in California’s Central Valley. He also asked how to address
silent disasters that are not in the headlines. Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez
expressed surprise at the lack of mention of the structure of governance. He
asked what provides stability in the webs Kasperson mentioned.
In response, Burton commented on insurance internationally, noting
that there has been talk of an international public-private partnership, and
that there are experiments with new insurance products in developing coun-
tries. Insurance could be used not only to spread risks but also to create
incentives for adaptation. He said that people need to learn from handling
extreme events and to build this learning into planning for “creeping” di-
sasters. Burton said that disasters are part of everyday life, and that what
makes disasters serious is embedded in society. People need therefore to
look at them in social terms, identifying how to reduce them in a precau-
tionary manner, cope with them when they occur, respond to them after
they happen, and absorb and use lessons for future events.
Adger responded by underlining Janetos’s point that government inter-
ventions may not help improve adaptation. Societies are bound by demands
to maintain the status quo. For example, drought recovery programs in
Australia took a lot of blame for damage from fires because the government
was subsidizing farmers to stay in dry areas with high fire risk. Australians
like their rural populations and will pay to support them even though it is
maladaptive.
Adger said that the United Kingdom is trying to get away from learn-
ing from disasters by being more proactive. The UK government is very
proud of its anticipatory planning for the Thames for 2100, but it is hard
to bring the population along. Planning agencies are planning for 2 mil-
lion new houses, many of them in vulnerable areas in the Thames gateway.
Adger does not think there is an optimal governance approach for adapta-
tion. In the United Kingdom, for example, local government structures face
different cultural identity issues. In the Orkney Islands, people looked at
climate change as an opportunity for more local control; in other local com-
munities, the dominant view was that the problems should be addressed
nationally.
Kasperson noted that systems ecologists have pointed out that risk
OCR for page 83
CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
management interventions often serve to keep a system from moving to
a new and more resilient state. He asked how policy can get out of that
quandary. Maria Carmen Lemos pointed out that to address this, one needs
to know the desirability of the state one is moving into—and people either
do not know what their collective preferences are, or they do not agree.
Thomas Dietz noted that people want to preserve their sense of place but
have a short time horizon. They try to preserve what they personally re-
member, not an ancient past. He added that there is not much knowledge
about this problem.
Maria Blair said that people fail to recognize the concept of social
inertia. The whole concept of adaptation suggests change, which people
often oppose. She suggested that allowing for processes with local control
or engagement might address this problem. Adger noted that his examples
of social inertia focus on things people do not want to change. On the
mitigation side, however, there may be support for changes if they are
seen as ways to improve welfare. For example, the UK “transition towns”
movement tries to make towns more resilient in a future after “peak oil”
by increasing local food production. However, many people affected by
weather-related risks see a relation to climate change, yet they are not
thereby motivated to reduce their emissions.
Richard Andrews pointed out that major change usually happens dur-
ing windows of opportunity. Posthurricane planning, for example, can pro-
vide such a policy window. Planning can be based on the recognition that a
community cannot afford to rebuild just the way it was and has to become
more adaptive. It is important to be consciously ready in advance to move
when those moments arise. Burton noted that in postdisaster situations,
however, there is always tremendous pressure to return to the status quo.
Andrews said that Florida, for example, has been maladaptive in having
the state become the primary insurer of coastal property when market rates
became politically unacceptable, whereas in North Carolina, state policy
has struck a less morally hazardous balance that combines increased coastal
insurance rates with a safety valve to assess all state property owners for
shares of losses above a high threshold of economic catastrophe. Burton
suggested that mitigation allows many more options at an individual level,
whereas most adaptation requires collective action, at least at the com-
munity level.
Christopher Farley questioned the value of terms like “maladaptation.”
The physical systems are extremely complex, and society has put policies in
place. He said that during the 1990s timber wars, the U.S. Forest Service
could have the “right” answer from the science, but society could insist on
action another way. He said it is important to create systems and processes
that allow society to make decisions with awareness of what the impacts
are. He also suggested that there is no way to draw the line between who
OCR for page 84
4 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
is vulnerable and who is not—in fact, the insistence of many elderly people
on not defining themselves as “vulnerable” is very positive and adaptive in
many ways—and that negotiation might be needed to draw such a line.
Jamie Kruse noted that the time scale of adaptation has to match the
changing conditions. “Social inertia” is a mismatch between what a group,
such as the workshop participants, believes to be the right choices and what
society is doing.
