Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

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Abstract

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.

Introduction

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability of human systems to global changes, especially climate change. A particular focus is on recent developments in scholarship that contribute to practical applications of adaptation and adaptive strategies. Kelly and Adger (2000), Füssel (2004) and O’Brien et al. (2004a) distinguish applications of research relating to vulnerability, including studies that relate to adaptation. The applications of interest here are those that contribute directly to adaptation initiatives to tangibly influence the vulnerability of human communities or societies to conditions related to climate change.

Adaptation in the context of human dimensions of global change usually refers to a process, action or outcome in a system (household, community, group, sector, region, country) in order for the system to better cope with, manage or adjust to some changing condition, stress, hazard, risk or opportunity. Numerous definitions of adaptation are found in climate change literature, mostly variations on a common theme. Brooks (2003, p. 8), describes adaptation as “adjustments in a system's behavior and characteristics that enhance its ability to cope with external stress”. Smit et al. (2000, p. 225), in the climate change context, refer to adaptations as “adjustments in ecological-socio-economic systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli, their effects or impacts.” Pielke (1998, p. 159), also in the climate context, defines adaptations as the “adjustments in individual groups and institutional behavior in order to reduce society's vulnerability to climate.” Based on their timing, adaptations can be anticipatory or reactive, and depending on their degree of spontaneity they can be autonomous or planned (Fankhauser et al., 1999; Smit et al., 2000).

The concepts of adaptation, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, resilience, exposure and sensitivity are interrelated and have wide application to global change science. Analyses range in scale from the vulnerability and adaptation of an individual or household to a particular climate stress such as drought, through the vulnerability and adaptation of a community to multiple stresses, to the vulnerability of humankind (or the global ecosystem) to all stresses and forces. Applications also vary by the phenomena of interest (biological, economic, social, etc.), and by time scale (instantaneous, months, years, decades, centuries). This paper looks closest at applications to human systems and human–environment systems, including communities, households, groups, sectors, regions and countries. While this focus includes the natural resource systems upon which societies depend, we do not review applications relating to the vulnerability and adaptation of physical or biological systems even though some of the concepts (particularly adaptation) have long, if contested, use in those fields (Smit et al., 2000; Smit and Pilifosova, 2003). It is in ecological systems that the resilience concepts have been most developed (Berkes et al., 2003; Holling, 2001; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). The resilience of ecosystems and socio-ecological systems is reviewed by Folke (2006).

Practical initiatives that tangibly address and improve societal adaptive capacity, thereby reducing vulnerability, are commonly expected to be evident at the community scale (Kates, 2000; Kelly and Adger, 2000; Ford and Smit, 2004). There are examples of international and national initiatives that have potential to contribute to the reduction of vulnerabilities of people, and their effects should be apparent in communities. For example, National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs), if effectively implemented, should generate results evident in communities. Community is used here to mean some definable aggregation of households, interconnected in some way, and with a limited spatial extent, analgous to Coombes et al.'s (1988) use of the term “locality.”

The following sections provide a brief overview of the concept of adaptation as it has been employed in a range of fields, and as it relates to adaptive capacity and vulnerability in the context of climate change. Then several purposes of adaptation analysis are distinguished in the climate change field, including one type of application that aims to contribute to actual adaptation strategies. The paper concludes with a review of analytical approaches which have been developed to facilitate this practical purpose.

Section snippets

Treatment of the adaptation concept

The term adaptation, as it is presently used in the global change field, has its origins in natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology. Although the definition of adaptation in the natural sciences is disputed, it broadly refers to the development of genetic or behavioral characteristics which enable organisms or systems to cope with environmental changes in order to survive and reproduce (Futuyama, 1979; Winterhalder, 1980; Kitano, 2002). Individual adaptations (or adaptive features)

Purposes of climate change adaptation research

One common purpose of adaptation analyses in the climate change field is to estimate the degree to which modeled impacts of climate change scenarios could be moderated or offset (or “mitigated”) by “adaptation to the impacts” (Parry, 2002; Mendelsohn et al., 2000; Fankhauser, 1998). These analyses address Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which commits countries to mitigate greenhouse emissions in order to avoid “dangerous” anthropogenic changes in

Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

Adaptation, whether analyzed for purposes of assessment or practice, is intimately associated with the concepts of vulnerability and adaptive capacity. A general conceptual model of vulnerability has emerged in the climate change scholarship, similar to the use of the concept more widely (Kelly and Adger, 2000; Downing, 2001; Turner et al., 2003; Smit and Pilifosova, 2003; Yohe et al., 2003; Adger, 2006). Consistent throughout the literature is the notion that the vulnerability of any system

From adaptation analysis to practice

Some general principles are now apparent from community-based vulnerability assessments aiming to contribute to practical adaptation initiatives. One is that the researcher does not presume to know the exposure and sensitivities that are pertinent to the community, nor does the research specify a priori determinants of adaptive capacity in the community. Rather, in this approach these are identified from the community itself. The methods require the active involvement of stakeholders,

Conclusion

Adaptation is still a novel concept to some in the climate change field, but is has considerable history in others fields. That work has shown that adaptations in human communities are closely associated with, and reflective of, adaptive capacity and vulnerability. In particular, it has shown that vulnerability is related both to the differential exposure and sensitivity of communities to stimuli such as climate change and also to the particular adaptive capacities of those communities to deal

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the stimulus provided for this paper by Elinor Ostrom, Marco Janssen, and the participants of the Arizona Workshop organized by Sander van der Leeuw in February 2005. The paper benefited from suggestions by Suzanne Belliveau, Randy McLeman and four anonymous reviewers. The ideas draw on research sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Climate Change Impact and Adaptation Program, ArcticNet, the Ontario Ministry of

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