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

people and generates more local environmental degradation than Mayan farming practices, forcing an intensifying drive to fell more forest for short-term productive gain. More than anything these cases tell us that the risk from environmental change is a product of social amplification – the failure to recognise and respond in time to emergent risk – rather than an intrinsic quality of the hazard itself. More contemporary evidence of the limits to adapt alongside climatic variability and extremes comes from the failure of coping and past rounds of adaptation made manifest by natural disasters from regional food security crises, to major hurricanes and floods, or local events such as flash floods, water logging and landslides that are local disasters (ISDR, 2009).
    Disasters occur when socio-ecological systems coping capacities are overwhelmed (ISDR, 2004). There are four basic pathways for this failure. First, as a result of a lack of resources – and the marginality that underpins this. This can force people (the poor and marginalised) to knowingly live or work in placesexposed to risk in order to access other benefits such as close proximity to livelihood opportunities. Lack of resources also limits people’s ability for self-protection. Second, as a result of a lack of information. Proactive adaptation is constrained when new hazards or vulnerability drivers emerge that are not planned for and may not be recognised until it is too late. This was the case in the 2003 heat-wave that claimed more than 35,000 lives in Europe, with earlier events, notably in Chicago, USA (Klinenberg, 2002), failing to stimulate learning and anticipatory adaptation in European cities. At the local level social networks can be as important as formal extension and advisory services for learning. Most acutely information fails when early warning is not provided (IFRC, 2005). Third, as a result of institutional failures. This is the principal reason for physical infrastructural failure – the proximate cause for many events. Institutions fail to enable adaptation when those at risk and managing risk are not able to learn critically, but rather are trapped in cycles of marginal improvements of existing behaviour (see Chapter 4 ); when those at risk and their advocates cannot hold risk managers to account; and when information and resources cannot be used effectively or equitably (Wisner, 2006). Fourth, as a result of the speed of development and application of appropriate technological innovations. In South Asia, in the space of a generation cell phone technology has enabled mobile phones to spread from being the preserve of the wealthy to a ubiquitous feature of urban and rural life alike with knock-on benefits including providing early warning for disaster risk (Moench, 2007). These accounts indicate the complexity of identifying limits to adaptation and the great sociological and geographical variation to be expected.
    The argument presented in this book responds to these four strands of enquiry starting from a perspective of wishing to understand, rather than measure adaptation. This requires a broad lens, close to Fankhauser’s comment that adaptation as a research field can be interpreted as a revision of sustainable development. Following the critical literature on sustainable development (for example, Grin
et al.
, 2010), climate change adaptation is seen as a process not an object, with discrete capacities, actions and outcomes offering windows for observation. Elements that are subject to being contested in discourse (as different explanations for events and situation are presented) as well as materially (as different actors compete for the control and use of assets and resources). This approach also builds on a belief that the limits of adaptation are rooted in culture and society; they can be subjective but are mutable (Adger
et al.
, 2009c). The primary aspiration of this work is to open debate on adaptation as a critical process.