Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation Read Online Free PDF Page A

assessments of adaptive capacity and action. The timing of the adaptation relative to its stimulus has led to additional types. Some draw from the disasters community, which uses a staged model of actions for tracking behaviour before and after disasters. Burton
et al.
(1993) distinguish adaptations that prevent loss, spread loss, change use or activity, change location or engage in restoration. More generally, adaptations can be reactive, concurrent (especially important for analysis of adaptation to gradual and ongoing changes in climatic norms) and anticipatory. Adaptive actions can be long- or short-term, and this has come to be associated with a distinction between actions aiming for short-term stability (coping) or longer term change (adaptation) (see Chapter 2 ). Adaptation has also been characterised according to the form of action (technological, behavioural, financial, institutional or informational), the actor of interest (individual, collection), the scale of the actor (local, national, international) and social sector (government, civil society, private sector); and the costs and ease of implementation (Smit
et al.
, 2000). Maladaptation is used to describe those acts that, through bad planning or inadvertent consequences, cause either local or distant consequences that outweigh gains (Smit, 1993).
What are the limits to adaptation?
    Literature on the limits to adaptation has largely been framed by the concerns of international actors. The challenge so defined is to provide guidance for policy makers on what might be achieved through adaptation to limit or avoid thedangerous impact of climate change as a parallel agenda to mitigation – to help achieve a balance in investment between mitigation and adaptation (Hulme, 2009). At first this seems a technical problem of assessing the economic costs of a range of technical solutions and applying cost–benefit analysis to a range of scenarios. This can certainly help. But if adaptation is to move us towards a more sustainable development path then technological investments are only part of the solution. Changes in values and associated governance regimes will also need to be on the agenda, or may force themselves on as established institutions fail in the face of climatic extremes. Examining these limits is more difficult.
    At root this approach to defining the limits to adaptation is contingent upon the levels of risk associated with climate change that are socially acceptable (Adger
et al.
, 2009a). Given the unequal social and geographical distribution of costs likely to come from mitigation or adaptation (and acceptable, or ‘unavoidable’ impacts) led strategies, this is also a political question. The limits to climate change adaptation when framed in this way are cultural, social and political. This may produce some surprising outcomes. Kuhlicke and Kruse (2009), for example, show how local adaptive actions to reduce flood risk along the Elbe river, Germany, rely mainly on anticipation and assumptions about state support, the latter actually being seen to undermine local resilience. In Australia risk of the re-introduction of mosquitoes carrying dengue disease is increasing as a consequence of government advice for households to adapt to increasing drought risk by installing domestic water tanks, the perfect breeding environment for the
Ae. Aegypti
mosquito (Beebe
et al.
, 2009).
    So, how can the limits of adaptation be ascertained? There are big lessons from the past in the failure of sophisticated civilisations from the Greenland Norse to Easter Island and the Maya of Central America. In each case a changing climate interacted with dynamic social pressures to undermine productive systems that overwhelmed adaptive capacity and led towards collapse (Diamond, 2005). Contemporary extractive land management systems are revealing their limits too. Sharer (2006) shows how contemporary industrial agriculture in lowland Guatemala and southern Mexico supports fewer