Assessing vulnerability of selected farming communities in the Philippines based on a behavioural model of agent's adaptation to global environmental change   总被引：5，自引：0，他引：5  

Lilibeth Acosta-Michlik  Victoria Espaldon 《Global Environmental Change》2008,18(4):554

Behavioural models that allow simple representation of the complexity of human–environment links are important in vulnerability assessment because they allow the analysis of human adaptive processes in a changing environment. This paper applies an agent-based framework that considers the behavioural model of farmers in three villages in a municipality in the Philippines. Agent-based modelling is a useful policy tool for simulating the effects of different adaptation options on reducing vulnerability because it allows representation of not only the dynamic changes in climate and market but also the dynamic adaptive process of different groups of communities to the impacts of these changes. Model simulations of adaptation options under various global change scenarios showed that production support would significantly reduce future vulnerability only if complemented with appropriate market support. It is thus important for policy to provide a complementary bundle of adaptation measures. Lack of money and information are the most important reasons for not applying available technical adaptation measures, which currently hinder reduction of vulnerability in selected villages in the municipality. Social networks, which play an important role in adapting to environmental changes, are limited to relatives and neighbours, who are important sources of informal credit.  相似文献   

Community level adaptation to climate change: The potential role of participatory community risk assessment   总被引：13，自引：0，他引：13  

Maarten K. van Aalst  Terry Cannon  Ian Burton   《Global Environmental Change》2008,18(1):165-179

This paper explores the value of using community risk assessments (CRAs) for climate change adaptation. CRA refers to participatory methods to assess hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities in support of community-based disaster risk reduction, used by many NGOs, community-based organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. We review the evolution of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster risk reduction, and highlight the challenges of integrating global climate change into a bottom-up and place-based approach. Our analysis of CRAs carried out by various national Red Cross societies shows that CRAs can help address those challenges by fostering community engagement in climate risk reduction, particularly given that many strategies to deal with current climate risks also help to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Climate change can also be explicitly incorporated in CRAs by making better use of CRA tools to assess trends, and by addressing the notion of changing risks. However, a key challenge is to keep CRAs simple enough for wide application. This demands special attention in the modification of CRA tools; in the background materials and trainings for CRA facilitators; and in the guidance for interpretation of CRA outcomes. A second challenge is the application of a limited set of CRA results to guide risk reduction in other communities and to inform national and international adaptation policy. This requires specific attention for sampling and care in scaling up qualitative findings. Finally, stronger linkages are needed between organizations facilitating CRAs and suppliers of climate information, particularly addressing the translation of climate information to the community level.  相似文献   

Taming São Paulo’s floods: Dominant discourses,exclusionary practices,and the complicity of the media     

《Global Environmental Change》2019

Climate change leads to more frequent and severe flooding, urging cities to adapt to protect their populations and assets. Despite exacerbated hazards, governments repeatedly draw on ‘tried-and-true’ approaches to protect the status quo, often with serious adverse effects for the poor and vulnerable. Yet, such dominant approaches do not go unchallenged as the media and other actors prompt public debate to assess flood impacts, scrutinise government decisions, and perhaps even promote alternative practices. News outlets are not, however, balanced or value-free; the events portrayed and the voices (and knowledges) recognised and included in media coverage deeply influence whether and how flooding is incorporated in policy. Focusing on São Paulo, Brazil, we examine how the media framed flood events and conveyed solutions during the city’s worst floods in recorded history. We demonstrate how competing media outlets largely depicted flooding as a natural phenomenon to be solved by governments and experts through existing techno-managerial practices, mirroring governmental partisan plans for adaptive action. In doing so, the media failed to offer a democratic space for public discussion, citizen contestation, and the advancement of alternative trajectories for adaptation. We posit that inclusive trajectories that address entrenched vulnerabilities and projected climate change will benefit from rigorous ethical debates around the media’s role in disaster coverage while strategically leveraging alternative media outlets as public pedagogy and agenda-setting tools.  相似文献   

The influence of gendered roles and responsibilities on the adoption of technologies that mitigate drought risk: The case of drought-tolerant maize seed in eastern Uganda     

《Global Environmental Change》2015

Gender-disaggregated, household survey data for Uganda are used to examine how gendered roles and responsibilities influence adoption of drought-tolerant (DT) maize, a new technology that can help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa adapt to drought risk. Multinomial logit (MNL) regression results indicate that, compared to men farmers, women farmers have much lower adoption of DT maize, mainly due to differences in resource access, notably land, agricultural information, and credit. Differentiation of women and men farmers by various characteristics reveals that whether a male farmer was younger or older, or poor or non-poor has no significant influence on DT maize adoption; but important differences among different categories of women farmers are identified. For example, the farmer group found least likely to adopt DT maize is young, poor women household heads. MNL results also show that wives strongly influence adoption of DT maize on plots controlled by their husbands. We discuss the implications of study findings for the development of well-targeted and socially-inclusive adaptation policies.  相似文献   

Rethinking barriers to adaptation: Mechanism-based explanation of impasses in the governance of an innovative adaptation measure     

《Global Environmental Change》2014

Many of the possible barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation have already been identified and catalogued in the academic literature. Thus far it has proven to be difficult to provide meaningful recommendations on how to deal with these barriers. In this paper we propose a different perspective, with different epistemological assumptions about cause and effect than most existing barrier studies, to analyze why adaptation is often challenging. Using the mechanismic framework, we study how the idea for an innovative “Water Plaza” was realized in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Mechanisms are understood as patterns of interaction between actors that bring about change in the governance process that lead to policy impasses. Our analysis reveals three mechanisms that explain the impasses in the first Water Plaza pilot project: the risk-innovation mechanism, the frame polarization mechanism, and the conflict infection mechanism. Only after several substantive changes in the project design, location choice, and process architecture was the project of Water Plaza's revitalized. We discuss how the short-sighted ideas about cause–effect relationships, reflected in the superficial identification of barriers, may prove to be counterproductive; if there is high uncertainty about the risks of an innovation, the solution of offering more certainty is not very helpful and could, as it happened in the case study, trigger other mechanisms, creating an even tighter deadlock. Our study also suggests that when adaptation is considered as something innovative, the chances will increase that the risk-innovation mechanism will occur. We conclude that unearthing mechanisms offers new opportunities and different types of strategic interventions in practice than most existing studies have offered.  相似文献   

Maladaptive trajectories of change in Makira, Solomon Islands   总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  

Ioan Fazey  Nathalie Pettorelli  Jasper Kenter  Daniel Wagatora  Daniel Schuett 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(4):1275-1289

Trajectories of change are dynamic processes of individual, group and/or societal responses to change which create further change and responses, with outcomes that reflect the cumulative properties of those processes. Understanding trajectories of change is an important initial step for designing appropriate adaptation strategies because even though responses may enable people to cope with change in the short term, the accumulated responses of individuals can generate undesirable maladaptive outcomes over longer periods of time. This paper examines trajectories of change in Kahua, Solomon Islands, where people have traditionally relied on subsistence activities and have in the past been subsistence affluent. Participatory methods, including 76 focus group discussions in 38 communities with 821 individuals, were used to determine changes in the region and its drivers. A conceptual model was developed of the underlying feedback processes within the Kahua social–ecological system. The results show that communities are facing rapid and extensive changes. Most changes, however, are being driven by the two key drivers of population growth and a strong desire for monetary prosperity that act synergistically to generate stress in communities. People are generally responding by focusing on income generation, which is reinforcing stress in communities and resulting in maladaptive trajectories of change. The results suggest development policy in the Solomon Islands needs to: (1) take the challenges of population growth much more seriously; (2) place greater effort on development activities that reduce per capita impact on the environment; (3) improve management of the high expectations for monetary prosperity; (4) increase emphasis on wellbeing aspects of development rather than income generation per se, and (5) better align development with existing adaptation strategies to ensure that vulnerability to future global change does not increase.  相似文献   

Hurricane preparedness as anticipatory adaptation: A case study of community businesses   总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  

Peter D. Howe 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(2):711-720

This paper examines adaptation to current storm surge flood risk as one indicator of anticipatory adaptation to climate change impacts. Focusing on community businesses, a web-based survey obtained information on hurricane preparedness and risk perceptions in Sarasota County, Florida. A model of current precautionary action that utilized previously identified business characteristics predictive of business preparedness and post-disaster recovery, a spatial variable indicating storm surge exposure, and items measuring the risk perception and information-seeking behavior of business owners explained a majority of the variance in current levels of preparedness. Use of online risk information sources and the geographic distribution of customers and were the strongest predictors of preparedness. Results indicate that the adaptive capacity of businesses may vary significantly with types of businesses, locations, and socio-cognitive characteristics of business owners. To encourage overall community resilience, risk communication efforts should be targeted based on specific elements that predict business preparedness.  相似文献   

Marine mammal co-management in Canada’s Arctic: Knowledge co-production for learning and adaptive capacity     

Aaron Dale  Derek Armitage 《Marine Policy》2011

This paper examines the challenge of knowledge co-production and the implications for learning and adapting in the context of a narwhal co-management in Nunavut, Canada. Knowledge co-production is the collaborative process of bringing a plurality of knowledge sources and types together to address a defined problem and build an integrated or systems-oriented understanding of that problem. The paper considers knowledge co-production by examining five interrelated dimensions: knowledge gathering, sharing, integration, interpretation, and application. Voices of hunters, community representatives, and managers engaged in co-management are highlighted to identify primary challenges and opportunities. The analysis reveals how compartmentalized views of knowledge continue to constrain adaptive and collaborative management. An understanding of knowledge co-production processes, however, may help to overcome the resilience of top-down management approaches.  相似文献   

Tolerance mechanisms in North American deserts: Biological and societal approaches to climate change     

Z.R. Stahlschmidt  D.F. DeNardoJ.N. Holland  B.P. KotlerM. Kruse-Peeples 《Journal of Arid Environments》2011,75(8):681-687

The deserts of North America and elsewhere may serve as ‘ecological petri dishes’ that can be used to study the general effects of global climate change (GCC) as these regions are expected to become warmer and drier at faster rates than other terrestrial regions. We highlight the biological and societal responses to such shifts in environmental parameters predicted to vary with GCC, and we introduce the term tolerance mechanism (TM) to inclusively describe the means by which organisms of natural systems or human society cope with such environmental challenges. We review the historical relationships between biological TMs and water availability, temperature, and energy resources, as well as describe societal TMs. We create a simplified conceptual model to predict the effectiveness of TMs in the context of GCC and conclude that, although currently functional, some desert TMs (e.g., biological adaptations by long-lived taxa) may be outpaced by GCC. We finish with suggested future TM-related research.  相似文献   

Providing new homes for climate change exiles     

Sujatha Byravan  Sudhir Chella Rajan 《Climate Policy》2013,13(2):247-252

Abstract

Given a certain pre-existing commitment to sea-level rise due to the long thermal lags of the ocean system, several million people living in coastal areas and small islands will inevitably be displaced by the middle of the century. These climate exiles will have nowhere to go. Rather than deal with this in an ad hoc manner as the problem arises, the authors propose a mechanism by which these exiles would be given immigration benefits by countries through a formula that ties numbers of immigrants to a country's historical greenhouse gas emissions. Such a compensatory mechanism appears to be a fair way of addressing the problems faced by climate exiles.  相似文献