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2.
This paper investigates whether and to what extent a wide range of actors in the UK are adapting to climate change, and whether this is evidence of a social transition. We document evidence of over 300 examples of early adopters of adaptation practice to climate change in the UK. These examples span a range of activities from small adjustments (or coping), to building adaptive capacity, to implementing actions and to creating deeper systemic change in public and private organisations in a range of sectors. We find that adaptation in the UK has been dominated by government initiatives and has principally occurred in the form of research into climate change impacts. These government initiatives have stimulated a further set of actions at other scales in public agencies, regulatory agencies and regional government (and the devolved administrations), though with little real evidence of climate change adaptation initiatives trickling down to local government level. The sectors requiring significant investment in large scale infrastructure have invested more heavily than those that do not in identifying potential impacts and adaptations. Thus we find a higher level of adaptation activity by the water supply and flood defence sectors. Sectors that are not dependent on large scale infrastructure appear to be investing far less effort and resources in preparing for climate change. We conclude that the UK government-driven top-down targeted adaptation approach has generated anticipatory action at low cost in some areas. We also conclude that these actions may have created enough niche activities to allow for diffusion of new adaptation practices in response to real or perceived climate change. These results have significant implications for how climate policy can be developed to support autonomous adaptors in the UK and other countries.  相似文献   

3.
The usefulness of adaptation strategies to changing climate depends on the characteristics of the system that must adapt. Divergent views on whether climate change will seriously affect society and what society can do about it can be traced, in part, to divergent views on these characteristics of systems. Issues of scale and how impacts are measured are also important. We identify a set of fundamental characteristics of natural systems and social systems that help to make underlying assumptions in climate change adaptation studies explicit. These are: Short-run autonomous flexibility; short-run non-autonomous flexibility; knowledge and capacity to undertake short-run actions; long-run autonomous flexibility; long-run non-autonomous flexibility; and knowledge and capacity to plan for and undertake adaptations that require changes in long-lived assets. Applications to crop agriculture and ecosystems illustrate how these portraits can be used. We find that if empirical research is to resolve questions of adaptability, more careful specification of the exact measure of impact and far richer models of the process of adaptation, able to test implicit assumptions in much of the existing empirical research, are needed.  相似文献   

4.
Transformative actions are increasingly being required to address changes in climate. As an aid to understanding and supporting informed decision-making regarding transformative change, we draw on theories from both the resilience and vulnerability literature to produce the Adaptation Action Cycles concept and applied framework. The resulting Adaptation Action Cycles provides a novel conceptualisation of incremental and transformative adaptation as a continuous process depicted by two concentric and distinct, yet linked, action learning cycles. Each cycle represents four stages in the decision-making process, which are considered to be undertaken over relatively short timeframes. The concept is translated into an applied framework by adopting a contextual, actor-focused suite of questions at each of the four stages. This approach compliments existing theories of transition and transformation by operationalising assessments at the individual and enterprise level. Empirical validation of the concept was conducted by collaborating with members of the Australian wine industry to assess their decisions and actions taken in response to climate change. The contiguous stages represented in the Adaptation Action Cycles aptly reflected the diverse range of decision-making and action pathways taken in recent years by those interviewed. Results suggest that incremental adaptation decision-making processes have distinct characteristics, compared with those used in transformative adaptation. We provide empirical data to support past propositions suggesting dependent relationships operate between incremental and transformative scales of adaptation.  相似文献   

5.
The need to adapt to climate change is now widely recognised as evidence of its impacts on social and natural systems grows and greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Yet efforts to adapt to climate change, as reported in the literature over the last decade and in selected case studies, have not led to substantial rates of implementation of adaptation actions despite substantial investments in adaptation science. Moreover, implemented actions have been mostly incremental and focused on proximate causes; there are far fewer reports of more systemic or transformative actions. We found that the nature and effectiveness of responses was strongly influenced by framing. Recent decision-oriented approaches that aim to overcome this situation are framed within a “pathways” metaphor to emphasise the need for robust decision making within adaptive processes in the face of uncertainty and inter-temporal complexity. However, to date, such “adaptation pathways” approaches have mostly focused on contexts with clearly identified decision-makers and unambiguous goals; as a result, they generally assume prevailing governance regimes are conducive for adaptation and hence constrain responses to proximate causes of vulnerability. In this paper, we explore a broader conceptualisation of “adaptation pathways” that draws on ‘pathways thinking’ in the sustainable development domain to consider the implications of path dependency, interactions between adaptation plans, vested interests and global change, and situations where values, interests, or institutions constrain societal responses to change. This re-conceptualisation of adaptation pathways aims to inform decision makers about integrating incremental actions on proximate causes with the transformative aspects of societal change. Case studies illustrate what this might entail. The paper ends with a call for further exploration of theory, methods and procedures to operationalise this broader conceptualisation of adaptation.  相似文献   

6.
A dramatic escalation of extreme climate events is challenging the capacity of environmental governance regimes to sustain and improve ecosystem outcomes. It has been argued that actors within adaptive governance regimes can help to steer environmental systems toward sustainability in times of crisis. Yet there is little empirical evidence of how acute climate crises are navigated by actors operating within adaptive governance regimes, and the factors that influence their responses. Here, we qualitatively assessed the actions key governance actors took in response to back-to-back mass coral bleaching – an extreme climate event – of the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017, and explored their perceptions of barriers and catalysts to these responses. This research was, in part, a product of collaboration and knowledge co-production with Great Barrier Reef governance actors aimed at improving responses to climate crises in the region. We found five major categories of activity that actors engaged with in the wake of recurrent mass coral bleaching: assessing the scale and extent of bleaching, sharing information, communicating bleaching to the public, building local resilience, and addressing global threats. These actions were both catalyzed and hindered by a range of factors that fall within different domains of adaptive capacity; such as assets, social organization, and agency. We discuss the implications of our findings as they relate to existing research on adaptive capacity and adaptive governance. We conclude by coalescing insights from our interviews and a participant engagement process to highlight four key ways in which the ability of governance actors, and the Great Barrier Reef governance regime more broadly, can be better prepared for, and more effectively respond to extreme climate events. Our research provides empirical insight into how crises are experienced by governance actors in a large-scale environmental system, potentially providing lessons for similar systems across the globe.  相似文献   

7.
Climate science to date demonstrates that natural and human systems must urgently adapt. Adaptation refers to changes in societies and ecological systems as they respond to both actual and anticipated impacts of the changing climate. While adaptation is not limited to the level of planning and policy, existing adaptation practice privileges institutional action. We argue that the definition of adaptation should be broadened to include the small, incremental changes made in our daily lives to accommodate the shifting ecologies in which we live. Drawing on critical adaptation research and our own ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South, we define everyday adaptation as the shifted ways a person works, eats, lives and thinks in response to climate realities, rather than the hardening of coastlines or the relocation of vulnerable structures. We integrate and build on existing scholarship on adaptation and the everyday to theorize the logics of everyday, hyperlocal adaptation. This hyperlocal scale is a critical component of any definition of adaptation and a useful lens for studying the way much of the global population adapts and will continue to adapt their lives to climate change. We offer two theoretical components of adaptation revealed by the everyday - adaptation labor and value adaptation – as lenses to see changes in everyday action. Through considering hyperlocal action, we then identify and explore four logics of everyday adaptation actions: lifestyle stability, socio-ecological reactivity, livelihood flexibility, and community capacity. Everyday adaptations are limited by individuals’ capacity to adapt and thereby determine the longevity, livability, and quality of life of places on the frontlines of climate change. We argue for understanding the aggregate effects of everyday adaptation in order to better align the actions of those living with climate change in their everyday lives and the large-scale adaptation projects aiming to protect them.  相似文献   

8.
Small-scale fisheries in developing regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change, but the assessment of climate-induced changes and impacts are often hampered by the data poor-situation of these social-ecological systems. Based on 40 years of scientific and local ecological knowledge, we provide a coherent narrative about the effects of a marine hotspot of climate change on a small-scale fishery across different geographical and temporal scales. We applied a mixed-methods approach to assess biophysical changes, social-ecological impacts, and the incremental spectrum of actions implemented at multiple levels to increase the adaptive capacity of a small-scale clam fishery. The warming hotspot here analyzed was the fastest-warming region in the South Atlantic Ocean. Long-term changes in wind intensity and direction were also noticeable at a regional scale. Both sea surface temperature and winds showed a clear shifting pattern in the late 1990 s. These climate-related stressors determined ecosystem and targeted population changes (e.g. clam mass mortalities, slow stock recovery rates after ecological shocks, habitat narrowing), and favored harmful algal bloom-forming organisms. Climate-induced drivers also affected the human component of the social-ecological system, preventing fishers from securing a fulltime livelihood and limiting the fishery economic potential. Adaptive responses at multiple levels provided some capacity to address climate change effects, and transformative pathways are being taken to adapt to climate-induced changes over the long-term. Transformative changes were fostered by the local perception of environmental change, shared narratives, sustained scientific monitoring programs, and the interaction between knowledge systems, facilitated by a bridging organization within a broader process of governance transformation. The combination of autonomous adaptations (based on linking social capital and fishery leaders agency) and government-led adaptations were essential to face the challenges imposed by climate change. Our results serve as a learning platform to anticipate threats and envision solutions to a wide range of small-scale fisheries in fast-warming regions worldwide.  相似文献   

9.
Adaptation is a complex, dynamic, and sometimes unequal process. Stemming from social ecological systems theories of climate change adaptation and adaptive capacity, this case study introduces the concept of ‘divergent’ adaptation. Adaptation is divergent when one user or group's adaptation causes a subsequent reduction in another user or group's adaptive capacity in the same ecosystem. Using the example of pastoral and agricultural groups in northern and southern rainfall zones of Niger, this study illustrates the concept of divergent adaptation by identifying changes to the adaptive capacity of users who are currently engaged in conflicts over access to natural resources. Similar to other studies, we find that expansion of farmland and the consequent loss of pastoral space are restricting pastoral adaptation. Divergent adaptations favoring agricultural livelihoods include cultivating near or around pastoral wells or within pastoral corridors, both of which limit the mobility and entitlements of pastoralists. Institutions rarely secure pastoral routes and access to water points, a problem that is compounded by conflicting modes of governance, low accountability, and corruption. The case study illustrates the need to enhance the adaptive capacity of multiple user groups to reduce conflict, enhance human security, and promote overall resilience.  相似文献   

10.
The projected impact of climate change on agro-ecological systems is considered widespread and significant, particularly across the global tropics. As in many other countries, adaptation to climate change is likely to be an important challenge for Colombian agricultural systems. In a recent study, a national-level assessment of the likely future impacts of climate change on agriculture was performed (Ramirez-Villegas et al. Clim Chang 115:611–628, 2012, RV2012). The study diagnosed key challenges directly affecting major crops and regions within the Colombian agricultural system and suggested a number of actions thought to facilitate adaptation, while refraining from proposing specific strategies at local scales. Further insights on the study were published by Feola (2013) (F2013), who stressed the need for transformative adaptation processes to reduce vulnerability particularly of resource-limited farmers, and the benefits of a predominantly stakeholder-led approach to adaptation. We clarify that the recommendations outlined in RV2012 were not intended as a recipe for multi-scale adaptation, but rather a set of actions that are required to diagnose and develop adaptation actions particularly at governmental levels in coordination with national and international adaptation initiatives. Such adaptation actions ought to be, ideally, a product of inclusive sub-sectorial assessments, which can take different forms. We argue that Colombian agriculture as a whole would benefit from a better outlining of adaptation needs across temporal scales in sub-sectorial assessments that take into account both RV2012 and F2013 orientations to adaptation. We conclude with two case studies of research on climate change impacts and adaptation developed in Colombia that serve as examples of realistic, productive sectorial and sub-national assessments.  相似文献   

11.
A critical challenge in supporting climate change adaptation is improving the linkage between climate-impacts and vulnerability research and public and private planning and management decisions. We highlight the need for bottom-up/top-down vulnerability assessment, bringing together bottom-up knowledge of existing vulnerabilities with top-down climate-impact projections, as a transparent basis for informing decisions intended to reduce vulnerability. This approach can be used to evaluate the likelihood of crossing identified thresholds of exposure, and to evaluate alternative adaptation strategies based on their ability to reduce sensitivity to projected changes in exposure and their robustness across uncertainty in future outcomes. By identifying thresholds for which adaptive capacity is limited in particular systems, adaptation and mitigation become complements where the magnitudes of climate change at which such thresholds cluster can help to define mitigation targets.  相似文献   

12.
The UK Government’s first National Adaptation Programme seeks to create a ‘climate-ready society’ capable of making well-informed and far-sighted decisions to address risks and opportunities posed by a changing climate, where individual households are expected to adapt when it is in their interest to do so. How, and to what extent, households are able to do this remains unclear. Like other developed countries, research on UK adaptation has focused predominately on public and private organisations. To fill that gap, a systematic literature review was conducted to understand what actions UK households have taken in response to, or in anticipation of, a changing climate; what drives or impedes these actions; and whether households will act autonomously. We found that UK households struggle to build long-term adaptive capacity and are reliant upon traditional reactive coping responses. Of concern is that these coping responses are less effective for some climate risks (e.g. flooding); cost more over the long-term; and fail to create household capacity to adapt to other stresses. While low-cost, low-skill coping responses were already being implemented, the adoption of more permanent physical measures, behavioural changes, and acceptance of new responsibilities are unlikely to happen autonomously without further financial or government support. If public policy on household adaptation to climate change is to be better informed than more high-quality empirical research is urgently needed.  相似文献   

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14.
What drives national adaptation? A global assessment   总被引：1，自引：1，他引：0  
That the climate is changing and societies will have to adapt is now unequivocal, with adaptation becoming a core focus of climate policy. Our understanding of the challenges, needs, and opportunities for climate change adaptation has advanced significantly in recent years yet remains limited. Research has identified and theorized key determinants of adaptive capacity and barriers to adaptation, and more recently begun to track adaptation in practice. Despite this, there is negligible research investigating whether and indeed if adaptive capacity is translating into actual adaptation action. Here we test whether theorized determinants of adaptive capacity are associated with adaptation policy outcomes at the national level for 117 nations. We show that institutional capacity, in particular measures of good governance, are the strongest predictors of national adaptation policy. Adaptation at the national level is limited in countries with poor governance, and in the absence of good governance other presumed determinants of adaptive capacity show limited effect on adaptation. Our results highlight the critical importance of institutional good governance as a prerequisite for national adaptation. Other elements of theorized adaptive capacity are unlikely to be sufficient, effective, or present at the national level where national institutions and governance are poor.  相似文献   

15.
This study examines the ways in which the adaptive capacity of households to climatic events varies within communities and is mediated by institutional and landscape changes. We present qualitative and quantitative data from two Maasai communities differentially exposed to the devastating drought of 2009 in Northern Tanzania. We show how rangeland fragmentation combined with the decoupling of institutions and landscapes are affecting pastoralists’ ability to cope with drought. Our data highlight that mobility remains a key coping mechanism for pastoralists to avoid cattle loss during a drought. However, mobility is now happening in new ways that require not only large amounts of money but new forms of knowledge and connections outside of customary reciprocity networks. Those least affected by the drought, in terms of cattle lost, were those with large herds who were able to sell some of their cattle and to pay for private access to pastures outside of Maasai areas. Drawing on an entitlements framework, we argue that the new coping mechanisms are not available to all, could be making some households more vulnerable to climate change, and reduce the adaptive capacity of the overall system as reciprocity networks and customary institutions are weakened. As such, we posit that adaptive capacity to climate change is uneven within and across communities, is scale-dependent, and is intimately tied to institutional and landscape changes.  相似文献   

16.
作为全球性危机,新冠疫情和气候危机在影响范围、效果、原因等方面的相似之处可能使两种危机的效果叠加,而二者的不同之处又可能导致应对政策的相互干扰,带来更加严峻的复合风险。文中全面分析了全球面临的新冠疫情和气候危机的复合风险,识别了新冠疫情对全球气候变化适应进程的影响,以及适应在各国疫后绿色复苏计划中的地位。研究表明,目前全球的绿色复苏中较少考虑适应,而绿色复苏为同时恢复经济和增强气候恢复力提供了机会,如果能在绿色复苏中考虑变革性适应,将显著提升社会经济系统对气候变化等冲击的抵御能力与恢复力,实现疫情后更持续和更有韧性的经济发展。  相似文献   

17.
The role of adaptation in impact assessment and integrated assessment of climate policy is briefly reviewed. Agriculture in the US is taken as exemplary of this issue. Historic studies in which no adaptation is assumed (so-called "dumb farmer") versus farmer-agents blessed with perfect foresight (so-called "clairvoyant farmer") are contrasted, and considered limiting cases as compared to "realistic farmers." What kinds of decision rules such realistic farmer-agents would adopt to deal with climate change involves a range of issues. These include degrees of belief the climate is actually changing, knowledge about how it will change, foresight on how technology is changing, estimation of what will happen in competitive granaries and assumptions about what governmental policies will be in various regions and over time. Clearly, a transparent specification of such agent-based decision rules is essential to model adaptation explicitly in any impact assessment. Moreover, open recognition of the limited set of assumptions contained in any one study of adaptation demands that authors clearly note that each individual study can represent only a fraction of plausible outcomes. A set of calculations using the Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) crop model is offered here as an example of explicit decision rules on adaptive behavior on climate impacts. The model is driven by a 2xCO2 regional climate model scenario (from which a "mock" transient scenario was devised) to calculate yield changes for farmer-agents that practice no adaptation, perfect adaptation and 20-year-lagged adaptation, the latter designed to mimic the masking effects of natural variability on farmers' capacity to see how climate is changing. The results reinforce the expectation that the likely effects of natural variability, which would mask a farmer's capacity to detect climate change, is to place the calculated impacts of climate changes in two regions of the US in between that of perfect and no adaptation. Finally, the use of so-called "hedonic" methods (in which land prices in different regions with different current average climates are used to derive implicitly farmers' adaptive responses to hypothesized future climate changes) is briefly reviewed. It is noted that this procedure in which space and time are substituted, amounts to "ergodic economics." Such cross-sectional analyses are static, and thus neglect the dynamics of both climate and societal evolution. Furthermore, such static methods usually consider only a single measure of change (local mean annual temperature), rather than higher moments like climatic variability, diurnal temperature range, etc. These implicit assumptions in ergodic economics make use of such cross-sectional studies limited for applications to integrated assessments of the actual dynamics of adaptive capacity. While all such methods are appropriate for sensitivity analyses and help to define a plausible range of outcomes, none is by itself likely to define the range of plausible adaptive capacities that might emerge in response to climate change scenarios.  相似文献   

18.
Australia's vulnerability to climate variability and change has been highlighted by the recent drought (i.e. the Big Dry or Millennium Drought), and also recent flooding across much of eastern Australia during 2011 and 2012. There is also the possibility that the frequency, intensity and duration of droughts may increase due to anthropogenic climate change, stressing the need for robust drought adaptation strategies. This study investigates the socio-economic impacts of drought, past and present drought adaptation measures, and the future adaptation strategies required to deal with projected impacts of climate change. The qualitative analysis presented records the actual experiences of drought and other climatic extremes and helps advance knowledge of how best to respond and adapt to such conditions, and how this might vary between different locations, sectors and communities. It was found that more effort is needed to address the changing environment and climate, by shifting from notions of ‘drought-as-crisis’ towards acknowledging the variable availability of water and that multi-year droughts should not be unexpected, and may even become more frequent. Action should also be taken to revalue the farming enterprise as critical to our environmental, economic and cultural well-being and there was also strong consensus that the value of water should be recognised in a more meaningful way (i.e. not just in economic terms). Finally, across the diverse stakeholders involved in the research, one point was consistently reiterated: that ‘it's not just drought’. Exacerbating the issues of climate impacts on water security and supply is the complexity of the agriculture industry, global economics (in particular global markets and the recent/ongoing global financial crisis), and demographic changes (decreasing and ageing populations) which are currently occurring across most rural communities. The social and economic issues facing rural communities are not just a product of drought or climate change – to understand them as such would underestimate the extent of the problems and inhibit the ability to coordinate the holistic, cross-agency approach needed for successful climate change adaptation in rural communities.  相似文献   

19.
The likely intensification of extreme droughts from climate change in many regions across the United States has increased interest amongst researchers and water managers to understand not only the magnitude of drought impacts and their consequences on water resources, but also what they can do to prevent, respond to, and adapt to these impacts. Building and mobilizing ‘adaptive capacity’ can help in this pursuit. Researchers anticipate that drought preparedness measures will increase adaptive capacity, but there has been minimal testing of this and other assumptions about the governance and institutional determinants of adaptive capacity. This paper draws from recent extreme droughts in Arizona and Georgia to empirically assess adaptive capacity across spatial and temporal scales. It combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify a handful of heuristics for increasing adaptive capacity of water management to extreme droughts and climate change, and also highlights potential tradeoffs in building and mobilizing adaptive capacity across space and time.  相似文献   

20.
Policies to secure energy and water supplies from the impacts of climate change are currently being developed or are in place in many developed nations. Little is known about how these policies of security, and the systems of resource provision they prioritise, affect householders’ capacity to adapt to climate change. To better understand the connections between resource provision and consumption, this paper explores the notion that different ‘energies’ and ‘waters’ can be conceptualised as material elements of social practices, which shape the way practices are performed. We draw on a study of Australian migrants and their experiences with different resource provision systems in multiple countries, time periods and contexts across three generations. We discuss the differing characteristics of energy and water provision across three broad resource ‘eras’, and the way resources enable or reduce resourcefulness, adaptive capacity and resilience. We find that policy makers may inadvertently reduce householders’ capacity to respond and adapt to climate change impacts by prioritising the resource characteristics of immateriality, abundance and homogeneity. We conclude that policy which prioritises the resource characteristics of materiality, diversity and scarcity is an important, underutilised and currently unacknowledged source of adaptive capacity.  相似文献   

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