Climate Change as Environmental and Economic Hazard

Boris Porfiriev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781138970922
• eBook ISBN: 9781136546211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The current policy for climate change prioritises mitigation over adaptation. The collected papers of Climate Change as Environmental and Economic Hazard argue that although efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are still vital, the new policy paradigm should shift the priority to adaptation, with a special focus on disaster risk reduction. It should also consider climate change not purely as a hazard and a challenge, but as a window of opportunity to shift to a new sustainable development policy model, which stresses the particular importance of communities' resilience.

The papers in this volume explore the key issues linked to this shift, including: ' Increasing research into the Earth Sciences, climate reconstruction and forecasting in order to decrease the degree of uncertainty about the origin, development and implications of climate change; ' The introduction of more binding and comprehensive regulation of both greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation measures, like that in the United Kingdom; ' Matching climate policy with that for disasters and mainstreaming it into overall development strategies. The volume is a valuable addition to previous climate change research and considers a new policy approach to this new global challenge.

research article

Strengthening socio-ecological resilience through disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation: Identifying gaps in an uncertain world

WILLIAM M. COLLIER¹,*, KASEY R. JACOBS¹, ALARK SAXENA¹, JULIANNE BAKER-GALLEGOS¹, MATTHEW CARROLL¹ AND GARY W. YOHE²

¹School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA

²Department of Economics, Wesleyan University, 238 Church Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA

Global environmental change and climate change are rapidly altering the world’s socio-ecological systems and affecting human populations at multiple scales. Important manifestations of these changes are hazard and disaster events. The emerging fields of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction provide significant opportunities to avoid and/or reduce many of the negative consequences associated with such events. Reviewing current attempts to link these two fields, we suggest an urgent need for a holistic and dynamic systems approach, focusing on socio-ecological resilience as a primary objective for adaptation and risk reduction. Furthermore, we propose two mechanisms for transformative change in these fields: (1) the use of iterative risk management as a primary instrument for adaptive decision making, and (2) the establishment of ‘boundary organizations’ and institutional changes that increase the transfer of knowledge between not only science and policy, but also science, policy and practice. There is immediate demand for participatory scholarly research to address the needs and concerns of practitioners on the ground. As a framework for these concepts, we see a dynamic systems approach to socio-ecological resilience as a means to deal with the inherent uncertainty associated with climate change and hazard events.

Keywords: adaptive management; boundary organizations; dynamic systems theory; knowledge networks; uncertainty; vulnerability

1. Introduction

Global environmental change is occurring at rates unprecedented in human history, challenging the resilience and adaptability of communities worldwide. This change can largely be attributed to environmental degradation from the exploitation of natural resources (e.g. Meyer and Turner, 1992; Dobson et al., 1997; Coleman and Williams, 2002) and the alteration of the earth’s climate system through unnatural amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere (e.g. IPCC, 2001; 2007). Focus on global climate change and its attributed environmental and socio-economic consequences over past decades, particularly over the last several years, has led to a growing body of literature and increasing concern about climate change impacts on human populations (e.g. Adger et al., 2003; IPCC, 2007; van Aalst et al., 2008).

Highly uncertain risks are expected to affect many dimensions of societies (i.e. agriculture, fisheries, energy, tourism, forestry, water resources, etc.) that are essential to the livelihoods of human populations, particularly in developing countries. For societies already vulnerable and sensitive to external stresses, climate change risks may exacerbate the social and economic conditions they face (Adger et al., 2003; Suárez et al., 2005). However, both contemporary and historical case studies, especially those in Africa and Asia-Pacific, have demonstrated that resilience is strong. Yet populations and communities have a new challenge to face that will certainly test this resilience.

The rate of change driven by increased anthropogenic GHG emissions continues to accelerate faster than previously anticipated (IPCC 2007; Rahmstorf et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2009). This is illustrated by one of the manifestations of climate change, the increasing intensity and frequency of natural disasters and extreme weather events (Srinivas and Nakagawa, 2008; Smith et al., 2009). The rate of increase of disasters as well as the numbers of people affected by these hazard events has been dramatic over the past decade (IFRC, 2003). Thus, the urgency to respond to these changes, even in the face of uncertainty, has become much more pressing and presents the need for assisted adaptation.

These recent trends have placed disasters at the centre of human–environment debates and have linked them with issues of development, technology and economic resiliency (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). As a response to this concern, international governance bodies, national governments, development agencies and organizations, non-governmental and non-profit organizations and private enterprise are creating mitigative and adaptive responses to these issues (Smit and Wandel, 2006). Special attention has been given to developing nations, which are considered to be the most vulnerable to the risks and pressures exerted by environmental change. In order to confront this, research endeavours, policies and practices that enhance resilience must be considered as a way to respond to a world that is in constant change (Pelling and Uitto, 2001).

In this article, we review the current understanding of natural and social disasters, the paradigm shifts in disaster management, the emergence of climate change adaptation (CCA) and the linkages between CCA and disaster risk reduction (DRR). Current scholarly and practitioner attempts to link the two fields are described, and we propose an urgent need for a holistic and dynamic systems approach, focusing on socio-ecological resilience as an opportunity to increase collaboration between the fields. We suggest two mechanisms to achieve this: (1) the use of iterative risk management as a primary instrument for adaptive decision making and (2) the establishment of boundary organizations and institutional changes to increase the transfer of knowledge between science, policy and practice.

The thoughts presented throughout this review are informed by a recent Forum held on 23–24 April 2009 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, entitled ‘A Dynamic Systems Approach to Socio-ecological Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction: Prioritizing the Gaps in a Changing World’. The two-day event covered many aspects of CCA, DRR and socio-ecological resilience. The participants, who are researchers, practitioners and policy makers, were charged with crossing traditional disciplines and boundaries to indentify and prioritize gaps and ways forward to link the fields of CCA and DRR for a holistic systems approach to deal with the inherent uncertainty associated with climate change and hazard events.

1.1. Understanding natural and social disasters

There is a significant body of literature regarding conceptualizations and definitions of disasters in the social science literature (e.g. Quarantelli and Dynes, 1977; Turner and Pidgeon, 1978; Quarantelli, 1988; 1998; Oliver-Smith, 1996). One such example is Oliver-Smith (1996, p. 303) who defines disasters as ‘a process or event involving a combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced state of vulnerability’. Thus, natural disasters are the result of the interaction between a vulnerable population and a hazard event. Consequently, climate change will have a twofold effect on disaster risk: (1) through the increase in weather and climate hazards, and (2) through an increase in social vulnerability to these hazards. By exacerbating ecosystem degradation and affecting livelihoods at the local level, climate change will become an additional stressor as well as an inhibitor for communities’ coping capacity (ISDR, 2002).

High vulnerability and low adaptive capacity have been associated with societies with a high dependence on natural resources (World Bank, 2000). This echoes the concern of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for low-lying coastal and island regions whose populations are highly reliant on natural resources; current adaptation for these communities is unbalanced and ‘readiness for increased exposure is low’ (IPCC, 2007, p. 15). Many of these regions are the most disaster-prone in the world and have experienced disaster relief and development interventions for decades. Yet resilience is still considered low in these countries. The lingering question, therefore, is ‘why?’ We will return to this question in detail later, but will first supply a background of the emergence of several important paradigm shifts.

1.2. From disaster response to disaster risk reduction

Since the 1970s, the disaster relief and humanitarian community has gone through several important paradigm shifts. The community, over the years, has refined its understanding and management of disasters, from identifying and responding to hazard events to determining and targeting the underlying drivers of vulnerability that turn hazards into disasters. Although the shifts are more recent, Carr (1932) proposed the conceptual model for many of these ideas much earlier. An important shift in the practitioner community came in the early 1980s, when the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proposed an approach to disaster management that distinguished between mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Similarly, following the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) (1990–1999), the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) was mandated to focus on the paradigm shift from disaster mitigation to disaster prevention, also known as DRR. At the interim of the IDNDR, the Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action for a Safer World led to a change in thinking about disaster mitigation (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). Movement in thinking and practice continued during the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR) in 2005 (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). As a result, the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) (2005–2015) was established as an international commitment providing technical and political agreement on issues necessary to reduce disaster risk. Ultimately, these shifts led to the newly recognized DRR framework. ISDR promoted this framework to development and humanitarian organizations worldwide. The combined efforts of various stakeholders produced an increasing desire to identify actions that promote reducing vulnerability before hazards can result in undesirable impacts, particularly within the context of climate change (Klein et al., 2003). This interest continues to date. In fact, the forthcoming IPCC Assessment Report (AR5) will have a distinct chapter on DRR as an adaptation strategy, and the IPCC is also developing a Special Report on managing the risks of extreme events and hazards, focusing largely on DRR (IISD, 2009).

Despite the efforts of the past several decades, including preventative measures that have been demonstrated to be more economically efficient than reactive ones, disaster relief, response and recovery still predominate. This is also discouraging because a growing body of literature suggests that post-disaster response can actually increase vulnerabilities in the long term (Anderson and Woodrow, 1998; Schipper and Pelling, 2006).

Nonetheless, as the emphasis continues to shift from disaster response to DRR, greater and sustained efforts are needed to make these changes within research institutions as well as development and humanitarian agencies and organizations (Linnerooth-Bayer et al., 2005). In such efforts, many institutions, agencies and organizations are developing analytical tools for disaster management, to identify indicators for effective disaster preparedness in the hopes of helping communities to reduce their risk from disasters. Likewise, Schipper and Pelling (2006) suggest that such risk appraisal and assessment methodologies could prove significant in designing development strategies in the future.

1.3. The emergence of climate change adaptation

CCA emerged from the international treaty of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, especially for developing country parties through Article 4. CCA has been given second priority to climate change mitigation (CCM) since its inception, however, because of a perceived sense of greater urgency to slow the pace of emissions in response to Article 2 obligations about avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference to the climate system (Pielke, 1998; Schipper and Pelling, 2006). For example, the Kyoto Protocol (2008–2012), an international agreement linked to the UNFCCC, sets legally binding targets for the reduction of GHG emissions but has only little emphasis on CCA. Many parties have disagreed on this prioritization, notably developing countries.

Limited success to date in CCM and increased clarity in climate change signals have made parties realize the importance and parallel urgency of adaptive measures and policies. Indeed, IPCC (2007) concludes that observed impacts from climate change to which the planet is already committed would continue throughout the next century even if GHG emissions were cut to zero. So, while CCM has traditionally been the pivotal issue for many climate change experts, CCA is now widely acknowledged as necessary for responding effectively and equitably to the impacts of climate change. In recent years, CCA has become a key focus of the scientific and policy-making communities and is now a major area of discussion under the UNFCCC. The Seventh Conference of the Parties (COP7) in 2001 addressed the special concerns of the world’s 38 Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which were given an opportunity to develop National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). Similarly, at the Eleventh Conference of the Parties (COP11) in 2005 the Nairobi Work Programme (NWP) (2005–2010) was established to focus exclusively on impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation. CCA gained further recognition at the Thirteenth Conference of the Parties (COP13) in 2007 when the Bali Road Map (BRM) and Bali Action Plan (BAP), which chart a path to move forward post-Kyoto Protocol, gave equal priority to both CCM and CCA. The BAP also identified risk management and DRR as important elements for CCA moving forward.

Governments, institutions, researchers, practitioners and populations are all preparing for the CCA challenge posed to societies. In such efforts, Klein and Tol (1997) and Huq and Klein (2003) have developed approaches to anticipatory adaptation. Increased importance of CCA and identification of DRR has led to numerous initiatives that address both DRR and CCA (e.g. UNISDR Work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GUEST EDITORIAL
• RESEARCH