Sustainable Adaptation to Climate Change

Prioritising Social Equity and Environmental Integrity

Katrina Brown, Siri Eriksen, Katrina Brown, Eriksen Siri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849714136
• eBook ISBN: 9781136528781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book sets out how to ensure that adaptation efforts are socially and environmentally sustainable, contributing to poverty reduction as well as confronting the processes driving vulnerability.

Over $100bn a year is pledged to help finance adaptation projects via the The Climate Adaptation Fund. These projects and their funding played a central role in the latest climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, ensuring that adaptation to climate change will be an international priority over the next few decades.

Many existing adaptation projects are however, not environmentally or socially sustainable. Adaptation projects that focus on reducing specific climate sensitivities can, even if bringing benefits, adversely affect vulnerable groups and create social inequity, or even unintentionally undermine environmental integrity.

Sustainable Adaptation to Climate Change examines how adaptation to climate change (types of measures, policy frameworks, and local household strategies) interacts with social and environmental sustainability. A mixture of conceptual and case study-based papers draw on research from Europe, Asia and Africa. It will be of interest to all researchers and policymakers in climate change adaptation and development.

Review Article: When not every response to climate change is a good one: Identifying principles for sustainable adaptation

SIRI ERIKSEN^1* PAULINA ALDUNCE² CHANDRA SEKHAR BAHINIPATI³ RAFAEL D’ALMEIDA MARTINS⁴ JOHN ISAAC MOLEFE⁵ CHARLES NHEMACHENA⁶ KAREN O’BRIEN⁷ FELIX OLORUNFEMI⁸ JACOB PARK⁹ LINDA SYGNA⁷ and KIRSTEN ULSRUD⁷

¹ Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, P.O. Box 5003, No-1432, Aas, Norway

² Department of Environmental Sciences and Renewable Natural Resources, University of Chile, Sta. Rosa 11.315, La Pintana, Santiago, Chile; Department of Resource Management and Geography, Melbourne School of Land and Environment, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia

³ Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), 79, Second Main Road, Gandhi Nagar, Adyar, Chennai 600 020, India

⁴ Center for Environmental Studies (NEPAM), University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Cid. Univ. Zeferino Vaz, Campinas, SP 13083-867, Brazil

⁵ Department of Environmental Science, University of Botswana, Private Bag 00704, Gaborone, Botswana

⁶ Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, Meiring Naude Road, Pretoria 0001, South Africa

⁷ Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1096, Blindern, Oslo 0317, Norway

⁸ Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, PMB 05, Ojoo, Ibadan, Nigeria

⁹ Green Mountain College, One Brennan Circle, Poultney, VT 05764, USA

Climate adaptation has become a pressing issue. Yet little attention has been paid to the consequences of adaptation policies and practices for sustainability. Recognition that not every adaptation to climate change is a good one has drawn attention to the need for sustainable adaptation strategies and measures that contribute to social justice and environmental integrity. This article presents four normative principles to guide responses to climate change and illustrates the significance of the ‘sustainable adaptation’ concept through case studies from diverse contexts. The principles are: first, recognize the context for vulnerability, including multiple stressors; second, acknowledge that differing values and interests affect adaptation outcomes; third, integrate local knowledge into adaptation responses; and fourth, consider potential feedbacks between local and global processes. We argue that fundamental societal transformations are required in order to achieve sustainable development pathways and avoid adaptation funding going into efforts that exacerbate vulnerability and contribute to rising emissions. Despite numerous challenges involved in achieving such change, we suggest that sustainable adaptation practices have the potential to address some of the shortcomings of conventional social and economic development pathways.

Keywords:

adaptation, climate change, environmental change, sustainable development, transformation, vulnerability

1. Introduction

Climate adaptation has become a more visible and pressing issue in recent years. In part this can be attributed to the recognition that the climate system will undergo changes in the coming century regardless of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to thermal inertia of oceans and the long atmospheric life-time of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (Matthews and Caldeira, 2008). However, it has also been reluctantly acknowledged that emission reductions are unlikely to decrease at the rate and magnitude necessary to prevent climate change that is dangerous to many (Parry et al., 2009; Schellnhuber, 2009). Adaptation is thus increasingly considered as essential to reducing vulnerability to dangerous climate change.

Yet, although adaptation can potentially reduce the negative impacts of climate change, little attention has been paid to the consequences of adaptation policies and practices for sustainability. In some cases, what seems to be a successful adaptation strategy to climate change may in fact undermine the social, economic and environmental objectives associated with sustainable development. Strategies or policies that make sense from one perspective, or for one group, may at the same time reduce the livelihood viability or resource access of other groups. Likewise, an eagerness to reduce climate risk through specific technologies or infrastructural changes may sometimes lead to the neglect of other environmental concerns, such as biodiversity (Næss et al., 2005; Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007; Eriksen and Lind, 2009). Hence, adaptation can have unintended negative effects both on people and on the environment.

A recognition that not every adaptation to climate change is a good one has drawn attention to the need for sustainable adaptation strategies and measures, and for qualifying what types of adaptation are desirable or not (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007). There is also an increasing recognition of the potential of climate adaptation to address some of the mistakes and shortcomings of conventional social and economic development pathways that have contributed to social inequity, poverty and environmental problems (Ulsrud et al., 2008). It is particularly important to identify the synergies between adaptation and sustainable development because urgent and overwhelming poverty problems in the world are far from satisfactorily addressed, and environmental problems other than climate change also threaten people’s livelihoods and quality of life. Indeed, most individuals and communities are adapting to multiple stressors, in addition to climate variability, extremes and the risk of disaster (Eakin, 2006; Reid and Vogel, 2006; Schipper and Pelling, 2006; Ziervogel et al., 2006; O’Brien et al., 2008).

Developed countries are committed to the goal of jointly mobilizing USD30 billion for the period 2010–2012 (and an additional USD100 billion a year by 2020) to address the climate-related challenges of developing countries, and much of this will go to adaptation (ENB, 2009). The increase in attention to and resources for adaptation suggests that it is critical to ‘get adaptation right’ in order to solve, rather than exacerbate, problems. Consequently, it is important to understand what it means to sustainably adapt to climate change, or what is referred to in this article as ‘sustainable adaptation’. Sustainable adaptation is defined here as adaptation that contributes to socially and environmentally sustainable development pathways, including both social justice and environmental integrity.

This article presents and discusses the concept of sustainable adaptation to climate change and identifies four normative principles to guide responses to climate change. We illustrate the principles of sustainable adaptation and their significance through case studies from diverse contexts. In the conclusions, we discuss the possibilities and limitations for achieving sustainable adaptation in practice. We suggest that despite numerous challenges, attention to principles for sustainable adaptation can contribute to socially and environmentally sustainable responses to climate change.

2. Climate change adaptation and sustainable development

Adaptation to climate change has been described from a wide range of perspectives, and many adjectives have been used to modify the term (autonomous, involuntary, planned, passive, reactive or anticipatory, etc.). In terms of climate change, adaptation has been defined as the process or adjustments through which people reduce the adverse effects of climate on their health and well-being, and take advantage of the opportunities that their climatic environment provides. Other definitions have argued more forcefully that adaptation includes the reduction of vulnerability (Smit et al., 2000; Debels et al., 2009). Leary (1999) and Burton et al. (2002) referred to climate adaptation as a wide range of behavioural adjustments that households and institutions make (including practices, processes, legislation, regulations and incentives) to mandate or facilitate changes in socio-economic systems, aimed at reducing vulnerability to climatic variability and change. Nelson et al. (2007) defined adaptation as the decision-making process and the set of actions undertaken to maintain the capacity to deal with current or future predicted change. These definitions are summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definition of adaptation: the adjustment to practices, processes and systems in order to ameliorate negative effects and take advantage of opportunities associated with climate change (IPCC, 2007).

Debates on climate change adaptation have taken place largely outside of the broader discourse on sustainable development (Bizikova et al., 2010). Although sustainable development has been included as a theme in many of the assessments by the IPCC (Munasinghe and Swart, 2000; Yohe et al., 2007), little attention has been paid to the identifying principles that create synergies between adaptation and sustainable development. Cohen et al. (1998) pointed out that although climate change is one of the most important symptoms of an unsustainable economic system, the climate change and sustainable development fields have been separated by differences in discourse. For example, climate change has been largely constructed as an environmental problem that can be solved by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with little attention to its social, cultural, political and ethical dimensions (O’Brien et al., 2010). This effectively bypasses the complex, context-specific and multidimensional challenges of sustainable development. The concept of sustainable development initially focused on the close connection between environmental problems, poverty, inequity and basic human needs. However, the concept of sustainability has been criticized as a vague policy term rather than an academic concept subject to rigorous analysis. It has been accused of being malleable to suit any interest, or a ‘rhetorical cover for business-as-usual politics’ (Cohen et al., 1998, p. 353), distracting attention from any fundamental changes in systems. There have, however, been many calls for ‘strong sustainability’, which involves changing current modes of development, questioning calls for continued economic growth and appealing for a less managerial approach to human–environment relations (Adams, 2009).

Cohen et al. (1998) argued that it is precisely in forging the links between climate change and sustainable development, in terms of focusing rigorous analysis and policy efforts on the political, social and ethical dimensions, that action in both areas can be achieved. According to Robinson and Herbert (2001), climate change can be made more relevant to policy by contextualizing it within a sustainable development framework. They argue that mitigation and adaptation can contribute to a range of sustainability goals, at the same time that sustainable development policies can contribute to emission reductions. As with debates about sustainable development, the climate change problem raises questions about the underlying development pathways causing both environmental problems and poverty (Adams, 2009). The issues of climate change and sustainable development thus converge in the call for fundamental changes to development pathways. A critical point is the recognition of alternative development paths, and ‘how much choice we have about what kind of world we will end up in’ (Robinson and Herbert 2001, p. 146).

3. Key principles for sustainable adaptation

An underlying premise for the concept of sustainable adaptation is that many responses to climate change will create social and environmental externalities, including trade-offs and negative consequences. Sustainable adaptation thus considers the wider effects of adaptive responses on other groups, places and socio-ecological systems, both in the present and in the future. Sustainable adaptation can be distinguished from adaptation in general in that it qualifies actions in terms of their effects on social justice and environmental integrity; that is, adaptation is sustainable only if it contributes (and at the very least does not seriously erode) these two features. This qualifying of adaptation is a response to concerns that adaptation has often been operationalized in practice through changes in technology, institutions and managerial systems (Klein et al., 2007), rather than challenging current development paths, including the social, economic and political structures that underlie many contemporary problems.

Sustainable adaptation can be considered necessary in response to three problems high-lighted in the vulnerability literature. First, climate change is a global problem that affects both current and future generations, and responses must be sensitive to both spatial and temporal consequences. Adaptations taken to benefit one sector or group may undermine the security and well-being of others, such as by influencing resource access and the integrity of ecosystems that many people depend upon for their livelihoods (Eriksen et al., 2005). Second, wide-spread poverty makes many individuals, house-holds, communities and states vulnerable to even small shocks and stressors. The tendency of poor people to be highly vulnerable to climate change is often used as a justification for implementing adaptation; however, whether or not the proposed adaptation measures will actually assist poor groups is seldom assessed. Since not any and every adaptation intervention reduces poverty and inequality (and some poverty reduction measures may aggravate vulnerability), sustainable adaptation measures need to specifically target links between vulnerability and poverty (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007; Eriksen et al., 2007). Third, the need to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and facilitate a rapid transition to low-emission economies suggests that adaptation measures should emphasize low-emission solutions. Responses to climate change can thus be seen as a means for promoting alternative development pathways, such as transitions to low-carbon economies, organic agriculture and horticulture, agroforestry, ecological sanitation, water harvesting, water purification by the use of solar energy, alternative modes of transport, decentralized re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Aims and scope
• Editorial: Sustainable adaptation to climate change
• Review Article: When not every response to climate change is a good one: Identifying principles for sustainable adaptation
• Review Article: Sustainable adaptation: An oxymoron?
• Research Article: Converging and conflicting interests in adaptation to environmental change in central Vietnam
• Research Article: Sustainable adaptation and human security: Interactions between pastoral and agropastoral groups in dryland Kenya
• Research Article: Gums and resins: The potential for supporting sustainable adaptation in Kenya’s drylands
• Research Article: The discourse of adaptation to climate change and the UK Climate Impacts Programme: De-scribing the problematization of adaptation