Drafting Authors: Neil Adger, Pramod Aggarwal, Shardul Agrawala, Joseph Alcamo, Abdelkader Allali, Oleg Anisimov, Nigel Arnell, Michel Boko, Osvaldo Canziani, Timothy Carter, Gino Casassa, Ulisses Confalonieri, Rex Victor Cruz, Edmundo de Alba Alcaraz, William Easterling, Christopher Field, Andreas Fischlin, Blair Fitzharris, Carlos Gay García, Clair Hanson, Hideo Harasawa, Kevin Hennessy, Saleemul Huq, Roger Jones, Lucka Kajfež Bogataj, David Karoly, Richard Klein, Zbigniew Kundzewicz, Murari Lal, Rodel Lasco, Geoff Love, Xianfu Lu, Graciela Magrín, Luis José Mata, Roger McLean, Bettina Menne, Guy Midgley, Nobuo Mimura, Monirul Qader Mirza, José Moreno, Linda Mortsch, Isabelle Niang-Diop, Robert Nicholls, Béla Nováky, Leonard Nurse, Anthony Nyong, Michael Oppenheimer, Jean Palutikof, Martin Parry, Anand Patwardhan, Patricia Romero Lankao, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Stephen Schneider, Serguei Semenov, Joel Smith, John Stone, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, David Vaughan, Coleen Vogel, Thomas Wilbanks, Poh Poh Wong, Shaohong Wu, Gary Yohe

Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

/pdf/adaptation-adaptive-capacity-and-vulnerability-3txg5bpzf9.pdf

Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

▶ Addresses a wide range of timely environment, economic and energy topics ▶ A forum to review, analyze and stimulate the development, testing and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies at regional, national and global scales ▶ Contributes to real-time policy analysis and development as national and international policies and agreements are discussed and promulgated ▶ 94% of authors who answered a survey reported that they would definitely publish or probably publish in the journal again

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change

While there is a recognised need to adapt to changing climatic conditions, there is an emerging discourse of limits to such adaptation. Limits are traditionally analysed as a set of immutable thresholds in biological, economic or technological parameters. This paper contends that limits to adaptation are endogenous to society and hence contingent on ethics, knowledge, attitudes to risk and culture. We review insights from history, sociology and psychology of risk, economics and political science to develop four propositions concerning limits to adaptation. First, any limits to adaptation depend on the ultimate goals of adaptation underpinned by diverse values. Second, adaptation need not be limited by uncertainty around future foresight of risk. Third, social and individual factors limit adaptation action. Fourth, systematic undervaluation of loss of places and culture disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation. We conclude that these issues of values and ethics, risk, knowledge and culture construct societal limits to adaptation, but that these limits are mutable.

Are there social limits to adaptation to climate change

Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in anticipation of or in reaction to external stimuli and stress. The dominant research tradition on adaptation to environmental change primarily takes an actor-centered view, focusing on the agency of social actors to respond to specific environmental stimuli and emphasizing the reduction of vulnerabilities. The resilience approach is systems orientated, takes a more dynamic view, and sees adaptive capacity as a core feature of resilient social-ecological systems. The two approaches converge in identifying necessary components of adaptation. We argue that resilience provides a useful framework to analyze adaptation processes and to identify appropriate policy responses. We distinguish between incremental adjustments and transformative action and demonstrate that the sources of resilience for taking adaptive action are common across scales. These are the inherent system characteristics that absorb perturbations without losing function, networks and social capit...

/pdf/adaptation-to-environmental-change-contributions-of-a-ej229crvle.pdf

Adaptation to Environmental Change: Contributions of a Resilience Framework

Adaptation to climate change in the context of sustainable development and equity

Contributing Authors: Brenna Enright (Canada), Samuel Fankhauser (EBRD/Switzerland), James Ford (Canada), Simone Gigli (Germany), Simon Jetté-Nantel (Canada), Richard J.T. Klein (The Netherlands/Sweden), Irene Lorenzoni (UK), David C. Major (USA), Tristan D. Pearce (Canada), Arun Shreshtha (Nepal), Priyadarshi R. Shukla (India), Joel B. Smith (USA), Tim Reeder (UK), Cynthia Rosenzweig (USA), Katharine Vincent (UK), Johanna Wandel (Canada)

Assessment of adaptation practices, options, constraints and capacity

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Adaptation to climate change in the context of sustainable development and equity

Assessment of adaptation practices, options, constraints and capacity