Hello,
Welcome to the 4th edition of my newsletter, I am very happy you are reading.
The big issue coming up on the adaptation agenda right now is the forthcoming global assessment report with the catchy title - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 2 report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. This IPCC report is part of the Sixth Assessment Report which consists of three Working Groups and a variety of other reports to inform governments of the latest knowledge on climate change.
The first one of these was published last summer and was hailed as a “code red for humanity” based on the physical science of changes in the climate system. The report talked about unprecedented changes with some of those being irreversible and showed that the world is likely to go past the 1.5 degrees warming agreed as a target in the Paris Agreement. Once this happens most of the world’s coral reefs will be in serious danger, sea level rise will endanger small island communities, and over a billion more people will experience extreme heat as well as worsening exposure to a range of other impacts. It is sobering reading.
Photo: Ryan Brown / UN Women. Mapping coral reefs in the waters around Mahe Island in the Seychelles.
What that report did not address is how we can adapt to those changes and this is one of the aims of the WG2 report coming out in a few weeks. The report is still being finalised but it is a summary of all the academic literature on the topic over the past seven years, so we can make some educated guesses as to what the key issues will be. All the authors and reviewers are volunteers and have given up their time over the past few years to get this done in a pandemic, so many many thanks to them for this global service.
I hope we will get the latest thinking and research on these three important issues: ambition, effectiveness and limits.
1. Are adaptation efforts ambitious enough?
On the one hand we see from the science that there are big changes in the climate happening now and coming toward us in the future. On the other hand, many adaptation projects and programmes are making small incremental changes to existing approaches, tweaking here and there within current systems. This might include for example providing more information for communities or policymakers to make informed choices or providing additional water points to support agriculture or animals in hot conditions. Some of these adaptations are necessary and sufficient, but in many cases we need to ask if this will be enough and at the scale we need given the latest science. It might be more efficient to use the small funds we have for the more significant changes we need to see now rather than wait. Making incremental changes might delay or distract from the major changes we need to see.
The report should show us how widespread this issue of incremental adaptation is and the gap between that and what is known about the escalating impacts.
2. How effective is adaptation?
Research has shown for several years that there are specific examples where adaptation programmes have not worked well. This can be for a variety of local and contextual reasons such as the politics of an area, the structural discrimination some groups are facing, the lack of high-quality participation or the lack of locally appropriate solutions. What has been a shift more recently is the broader assessment by some scholars that the overarching policy agenda of adaptation is not working as well as it needs to. This moves the problem from one of a few specific cases to how the agenda itself is framed, financed and implemented. Some newer research also shows that in some cases adaptation may worsen vulnerability in the longer term. For example, building a sea wall to protect communities living close to the coast may encourage them to stay in the area. If storm surges are higher than expected or planned for, these people may be more vulnerable than if they had moved. This is called maladaptation.
The report should provide us with an understanding of the strength of the evidence behind more systemic challenges and how we might address them.
3. Where does adaptation stop and loss and damage begin?
The last report contained the issue of the limits to adaptation, this is when the impacts are so severe there are practical, economic or political reasons why it will not be feasible to adapt to those changes. As the science has shown the likely increase in temperatures will go past 1.5 degrees, this issue is becoming more and more important. Once we reach the limits to adaptation, countries, communities and individuals will face irreversible loss and damage. This could include loss of cultural heritage if people have to move from one location to another, the costs of storm damage in a coastal city, or the emotional damage from repeated climate impacts. The relationship between loss and damage and adaptation however is one that still needs to be better understood, as well as how we know when we reach the limits to adaptation. These limits might not be hard physical limits but also driven by local values and perceptions of risk.
The report will hopefully shed some light on this issue and also direct researchers to areas that need further work.
Photo: Keith Polya. Aerial view of the Marshall Islands facing loss and damage from sea level rise.
I look forward to reading the final version in a few weeks and reporting back on what the authors found.
Listening this week
This week I have been reading many academic books for a big application. Fascinating to me but maybe not so appropriate for the newsletter - though try these two if you like to think about applying social theory to adaptation!
Instead, I would like to share with you some podcast episodes I have listened to recently with different perspectives on adaptation issues.
1. Changing Climate, Changing Migration
This is a whole series on climate change and migration by the Migration Policy Institute. I am not an expert on this issue and I enjoyed the range of episodes as a good introduction. Each episode is about 25 mins and I started with Does Climate Change Cause Migration?
2. The A Factor: accountability for locally led adaptation
Convened by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) this episode is part of a mini-series on locally led adaptation and challenges practitioners and researchers to put forward and defend ways to empower local communities to adapt to climate change.
3. The Daily – Which Towns are Worth Saving?
There are a few relevant episodes on The Daily but I enjoyed this one in particular on which towns are worth saving from flooding. It focuses on North Carolina in the USA.
Thanks for reading!
Susannah
P.S. Please forward this to a friend or colleague who might want to hear more about adaptation. Thanks!
Compliments to you DR for the info on adaptation. The locally -led strategy if appropriately implemented would be the best. This is so because its cheaper, relevant and sustainable. Locals require to be empowered to give credible data(indigenous inclusive) on climate change in order to decide on the realistic and compatible interventions.