Climate Change Adaptation Strategies

Abstract

Adaptation strategies prepare a community to be resilient in the face of unavoidable climate change impacts. Climate impacts such as sea level rise, temperature changes including extreme heat events, and change in precipitation patterns can have a variety of secondary impacts on community conditions from human health and safety, to economics, to ecosystem integrity. The challenge of developing effective community adaptation policy is the need to apply the evolving science that describes a global phenomenon at a regional and local level. The inherent difficulty in projecting global climate change impacts is amplified at these levels; currently, regional and local forecasts of the impacts of climate change are considered to be very uncertain.1 Handling this uncertainty in a policy context requires a combination of flexibility, a willingness to adapt, and careful evaluation of potential climate impacts in the local context.