Adaptation in Climate Change Inquiry

Throughout its trans-disciplinary polysemy, the concept of adaptation comprises pertinent standpoints for elucidating adaptation to climate change. This is true even for the environment sciences in general, as inter-disciplinarity, environment and adaptation can be easily connected (Simonet, 2010). But, to reiterate, adaptation to climate change is regarded as an ambiguous topic. Even with regard to responses to broad global environmental changes, adaptation has multiple definitions. The variations in these definitions point to the diverse approaches that are conceivable for understanding adaptation, even within climate change adaptation discourse. This section discusses the more contemporary renderings of adaptation to climate change and variability specifically. The current studies deliberate on the capacity of humans to respond to global climate change utilising the notions of risk, vulnerability, resilience and adaptation to understand the potential damage and responses.

Some of the definitions continue to echo the evolutionary-biology definition of adaptation as a process whereby the members of a population become suited over generations to endure and reproduce, though entailing human deliberation and practices (O’Brien and Holland, 1992;

Schipper, 2007). For instance, Schipper (2007:5) says:

As cognisance of harmful human impact on the environment as cause for risk to humans has superseded the idea that humans are at the mercy of the environment, adaptation has gone from being conceived as something done by plants and animals in evolution as a response to environmental changes, to being advanced [on the basis of human adaptation] as a concept for directing policy to ensure sustainable development, reduce vulnerability and minimise risk to humans from climate change.

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In this light, common analyses have involved looking at impacts, technological adaptation and variations among regions in terms of risk distribution in the face of environmental changes.

Following that, the aim of adaptation to climate under the initial framing especially by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to respond to ambiguous risk (arising from the impacts of environmental change), so as to bring the system back to its original state (Ayers, 2010). This has evolved at times into an impacts-based approach to adaptation (Burton et. al, 2002) which has ensued in what Klein (2008) specifies as technology-based interventions such as dams construction, early-warning systems, and seeds and irrigation schemes founded on specific knowledge and projections of future climate conditions. Such an approach calls for scientific climate change expertise to identify and quantify the existing or anticipated impacts of climate change, and then designing interventions to specifically target those impacts. However, an impacts-based framing of adaptation is problematic because it implies a response directed at an uncertain risk.

Furthermore, the manner in which climate change risks are defined has substantial implications for how these risks are evaluated, and consequently how adaptation policy decisions are made.

For example, an impacts-based perspective connotes that a particular type of scientific or technological expertise is needed to assess climate risks for policy-making. This would involve codifying future climate change risks into defined climate impacts and producing calculated responses to these impacts (Pelling and High, 2005a). For instance, Klein (2008) describes a scenario where an impacts-based scientific risk assessment submits that the primary climate risk in an area is increasing drought, impacting on domestic and agricultural water supplies. Hence, an impacts-based adaptation response would be to install a water management system, to address the specific problem of water scarcity in that area (Ayers, 2010).

Besides the question of impacts and risks, vulnerability perspectives have been popularised in understanding adaptation and partly as a response to the impacts-based strand (though not inherently inconsistent with it). Vulnerability has found its place in the climate change lexicon, with both natural and social scientists anxious to measure and assess vulnerability, whether from the spatial level of regions, sectors, ecosystems or social groups (O’Brien et.al, 2007). Several

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commentators from disaster risk reduction, famine and food insecurity and development studies draw attention to the nexus between the risks people face and the reasons behind their vulnerability to these risks in the first place (Adger, 1996; Bohle et. al, 1994; Chambers, 1989;

Sen, 1981). However, even if it were achievable to isolate and assess the biophysical impacts of hazards and risks in physicalist terms, this disregards the ways in which local and wider circumstances influence peoples’ vulnerability to these hazards. Therefore, when applied to climate change, instead of accepting that vulnerability is merely a function of the damage that climate change may do to a social system, this perspective underlines – and quite importantly – the social dimensions of vulnerability (Kelly and Adger, 2009).

Like the very notion of adaptation, the global climate change literature is marked by differential meanings and interpretations of vulnerability. O’Brien et.al (2007) highlight that these divergent meanings and interpretations are not only the consequence of the wide breadth and scope of climate change research and the various scientific communities involved, as they also arise because of contrasting framings and discourses of climate change. Essentially, these differing definitions are reflections of different discourses on climate change that not only symbolise distinguishable approaches to science, but also disparate political responses to climate change.

In this context, O’Brien et. al (2007) draw attention to the differentiation between outcome and contextual vulnerability. An end-point approach (outcome) reckons vulnerability as:

[Th]e end point of a sequence of analyses beginning with projections of future emission trends, progressing to the development of climate scenarios and thence to biophysical impact studies and the recognition of adaptive option, whilst the starting point approach (contextual), in counterpoint, views vulnerability as a present inability to grapple with external pressures or changes, which in this case is changing climate conditions (O’Brien et.al, 2007:75).

As such, adaptation to climate change can be directed at altering contextual conditions or at reducing vulnerability. In a similar vein, a distinction is sometimes made between biophysical and social constructs of vulnerability. In this distinction, the biophysical approach focuses on degradation of physical conditions and extrapolates directly the impacts on human populations of these conditions (Liverman, 1990). On the contrary, the social constructivist approach dwells on the patterns of social processes that either contribute to or reduce vulnerability. The biophysical

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approach has been regarded as the dominant approach employed in the studies of vulnerability to climate change. Nonetheless, whilst assessment of biophysical conditions is necessary, it is not sufficient for understanding the complex dynamics of vulnerability. Lambert (1994) specifically points out that it neglects structural factors and human agency in both producing vulnerability and adapting. Other shortcomings include its neglect of everyday social processes that influence differential vulnerability. In addition, Liverman (1990) contends that the emphasis on physical aspects has resulted in an over reliance on science and technological solutions.

Therefore, drawing upon food security and natural hazards scholarship, a social vulnerability perspective on climate change has emerged that concentrates specifically on how climate risks are experienced locally. As highlighted by Ayers (2010), this position is intimately tied to Sen’s (1981) capabilities approach in which a natural hazard only becomes hazardous when it impacts people’s capabilities to execute their desired tasks. In turn, other elements that constrain people’s capabilities (be they financial, cultural, political, or physical) will affect their ability to deal with risky situations. At the same time, the perspective demonstrates that local people are not mere disaster victims but are able to respond to events and situations. In-and-of-itself, many advocates of a social-vulnerability approach to adaptation indicate that impacts-based risk assessments, and the ensuing adaptation measures, can only be partially effective if they do not also address non-climatic factors that are the fundamental drivers of vulnerability (Ayers and Dodman, 2010;

Schipper, 2007).

Additionally, there is a broad body of theoretical literature that conceptualises adaptation to climate change by connecting in different ways the notions of vulnerability, adaptive capacity and resilience. As the IPCC (IPCC, 2001) sometimes claims, vulnerability is a function of sensitivity, exposure and resilience. At the same time, Brooks (2003) and Fussel (2007a) are of the view that the distinction between potential adaptation (adaptive capacity) and actual adaptation is also needed, in part to reflect the temporal dimension of climate change. Similarly, Nelson et. al (2007) also link adaptation to the resilience discourse and thus define adaptation as decision-making processes and actions that enhance adaptive capacity. In the end, though, resilience demands actual adaptation practices rather than mere adaptive potential. In a related point, Riebsame (1991) distinguishes between adaptation and resilience, in that the former entails

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change and the later entrenchment of existing systems which may not be sustainable over the long-term. For other scholars, notably Kelly (2004), social resilience pertains to the actual capacity of a community to cope with disruptions or changes and to sustain adaptation measures (Kelly, 2004). Overall, a theoretical account based on resilience considers a resilient community as being able to respond to changes or stress in a positive way, and is able to uphold its core functions as a community in spite of stresses.

Beyond these approaches, it is important to note the emergence of a political economy of climate change (as coined by Tanner and Allouche, 2011). This approach affords attention to how climate change hazards are unequally distributed amongst nations, communities and groups, how vulnerability is thereby differentiated across the world and, significantly, how adaptation is also uneven. More so than other approaches, the political economy perspective considers climate change adaptation in political (or power) terms. Assuming this approach improves the understanding of the spatial complexities of climate change, and the divergences in risks and vulnerability distribution as well as the power relations mediating and animating adaptation strategies at different spatial levels. Similarly, adaptation is posited within existing poverty levels and income inequalities, therefore highlighting the uneven distribution of the impacts of climate change and the resultant inequity and unfairness in life-chances.

Arguments from within the political economy framework have also centered on global environmental justice, rights and compensation in relation to the need for climate change mitigation, adaptation and governance (Adger et. al, 2006; Jamieson, 2001; Roberts and Parks, 2007). Taylor (2014), in espousing an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the traditions of political economy and political ecology, contends that incumbent approaches to climate change adaptation need to engage more systematically with the diversity of power relations that determine the social and ecological parameters of agrarian livelihoods. Therefore, there is need to ask who has power to define and pursue adaptation in agrarian environments influenced by long-term processes of social and environmental change and characterised by persisting hierarchies based on class, gender and caste.

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Concurrently, questions on whether adaptation ought to be interpreted as a process, action or outcome have likewise emerged in climate change research. Process arguments are evoked within a systems approach which gives attention to system properties, including evolving conditions and activities that might enable or constrain action. Action approaches dwell on the purposeful activities (namely, adaptations as singular actions that are taken by actors) which may curb harm from climate change (Eisenack and Stecker, 2011), while outcome approaches center on the end results or impact (in most cases measuring success, effectiveness or sustainability) (Eriksen et. al, 2011). In this way, actor-based analytic thinking considers the processes of negotiation in pursuing adaptation and the systems-based analysis examines the implications of these processes on the rest of the system. Hence, adaptive capacity, at least from a systems position, has been depicted as the ability to learn from mistakes (Adger, 2003), to engender experience of dealing with change (Berkes et. al, 2003) and the capacity for innovation in the face of vulnerability and risk.

A range of specific approaches (such as the resilience approach noted earlier) are sometimes framed within a systems perspective, in considering – from a dynamic perspective – adaptive capacity as a core feature of resilient social-ecological systems. In doing so, it makes the claim that social and ecological systems cannot be conceived in isolation from one another but must be understood as interrelated and coupled systems. The systems approach as well bears a temporal component that is significant to the concept of adaptation. It regards adaptation not in light of specific activities but instead by how activities feedback, either positively or negatively, into the system-at-large through time. Adaptation is therefore understood by attending not only to the characteristics of systems, but also to processes and outcomes of adaptation actions.

But systems-theory has broader resonance within the adaptation literature, as it privileges adaptation as both a process and its outcome. Generally, in this context, adaptation can be any process, action or outcome in a system (for example, ecosystem, household, community, group, sector or region) that facilitates the system to better cope with, manage or adjust to the changing conditions, stresses, hazards, risks or opportunities related to climate change (Smit and Wandel, 2006). In addition, adaptation relates to changes in processes, practices or structures to contain or offset possible damages or to possibly even capitalise on opportunities related to changes in

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climate. From the IPCC's definitions and the analysis of Smit et al. (2000), adaptation is a response to (potential) environmental stimuli that impact given entities, subjects or systems. In this light, adaptations are processes within entities and systems, or adjustments made by human systems (Eisnack and Stecker, 2011).

Another key discussion point within the literature is what qualifies as adaptation and what differentiates adaptation from other existing responses. In this case, the connection between managed, policy-driven adaptation and autonomous, locally-driven adaptation, and the manner in which these play out in the context of environmental changes more generally, has been given attention. In most cases local-level adaptations are imagined as reactive, while policy-driven adaptations are said to be planned. In this regard, Glantz (1992) reasons that adaptations are unplanned reactive responses to a condition already experienced whilst mitigation requires some anticipatory planning. Burton et.al (1993) put a further twist on this by stating that short-term responses or measures are not adaptations. In relation to this, a key point becomes the question of temporality and whether actions are meant to buffer current activities or facilitate change. This therefore brings up critical questions about whether a process of adaptation entails immediate behavioural adjustments made to alter livelihoods in the face of changing climatic conditions or, alternatively, implies the longer-term development of technological and infrastructural changes necessary to sustain livelihoods over time (Schipper, 2007).

Besides temporality, the significance of different spatial levels is brought to the fore in the literature, although not necessarily explicitly. Certainly, the political economy perspective ostensibly addresses this. It is noticeable that, in terms of spatiality, macro-level studies concentrate on country-level themes climatic themes and on national policies and strategies, while micro-level studies centre on actions and decisions by local groups such as farmers.

Attention though has also been focused on individual behaviour and strategies (Agrawal, 2008).

Indeed, the focus on individual behaviour is rife in climate change and adaptation studies and is informed by psychological theories on people’s risk perceptions and attitudes (Leiserowitz, 2006; Lorenzoni and Pidgeon, 2006; Whitmarsh, 2005). As I have indicated repeatedly, this thesis is positioned as a micro-level study (at community and household levels) but it avoids methodological individualism because of its emphasis on conditions, processes, and structures.

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In the final analysis, as this review indicates, adaptation assumes varied understandings in global climate change inquiry. What is clear is that the initial framing of adaptation in climate change research concentrated on technological aspects, and social vulnerability and resilience were only later given attention. Besides attempting to create diverse linkages among adaptation, vulnerability, risk and resilience, studies also dwell on different spatial and temporal scales. At the same time, although studies do not agree on defining adaptation, they generally concur that it can be regarded as a process, practice and outcome. Having said that, my point of departure is that whilst these studies reflect how adaptation has been analysed at a global level, my thesis focuses on adaptation at the micro-level. Concurrently, my thesis is more inclined to positions that recognise human agency as well as to process-oriented arguments on adaptation found in this global climate change literature. However, though the above studies utilise various middle level concepts such as vulnerability and resilience, my thesis draws on a sociological theory to understand adaptation as underpinned by various structures, processes, and conditions.