Associate Professor Sarah Boulter is Associate Professor of Climate Adaptation at the University of Tasmania and leads the NESP Climate Adaptation Initiative. She has spent the last decade building and supporting climate adaptation research and practice in Australia.
Meeting in Bergen last month, researchers from around the world shared ideas of climate adaptation through a human geography lens. Members of the Enablers of Best Practice Adaptation project were there to share our work and learn. One of the consistent messages we heard was concern that adaptation is not happening at a speed or with enough impact to avoid changing society in undesirable ways. In the words of Carlo Aall (Western Norway Research Institute) we must ‘transform or be transformed’. Much of the 2-day conversation focused on how to consciously shift the social paradigm to elevate adaptation to a deliberate decision to change society. Here we reflect on a few of the speakers and their views on changing views toward climate change adaptation.
Failing to adapt
Exploring why our efforts to adapt are still insufficient, Emily Boyd (Lund University) emphasised adaptation as a fundamentally social issue. She characterised adaptation as ‘cross-scale and borderless’ with society having a shared responsibility for collective action. One of the challenges to transforming society in order to adapt are ‘competing political imaginaries’. Boyd highlighted a resistance to top-down, government-led adaptation approaches that neglect the needs of communities and their cultural ways of relating to their environment. She argues that by focusing on vulnerability as equivalent to powerlessness, attention is diverted from the need to transform the social structures and interests that maintain the status quo. For example, the practice of mapping risk takes a pre-determined index of vulnerability but cannot map local collective action and ways of relating to the environment. Boyd flagged a need to look at affluent parts of the community, to understand how those with power make decisions, and consider the role of ‘affluent vulnerability’.
Neil Adger (University of Exeter) offered a different approach, seeking to imagine a ‘Ministry of Climate Adaptation’ as a solution in the UK. Adger’s Ministry concept elevates adaptation above the ‘mainstreaming’ approach one that tends to lack spending power and reinforces existing social and governance structures that hinder adaptation. Adger was clear that such a ministry faced challenges of measuring the outcomes of its interventions, enabling community-led adaptation, and understanding what constitutes adaptive capacity and resilience. The challenge that ‘adaptation is everything so is nowhere and nothing’, according to Adger, calls for very deliberate and visible design and action.
Daniel Puig welcomes delegates of the Human Geographies of Climate Adaptation Conference to Bergen.
Making space for transformation
While conference participants were clear on the need for social and economic transformation, achieving it is much harder. Lily Salloum Lindegaard (Danish Institute for International Studies) highlighted the call for ‘evidence’ from policy makers. The problem, how to demonstrate the potential of social change before it happens.
In Germany, Harmut Fuenfgeld and his team at the University of Freiberg have been working with local municipalities in a co-productive approach to provide spaces for transformational adaptation through an inclusive participatory engagement approach. At its heart, the approach shifts power to stakeholders impacted by both climate change and any adaptation decisions. A similar approach was followed in the development of the K’gari adaptation plan led by K’gari traditional owners, the Butchulla.
Delivering good climate information for adaptation
The intersection between good climate science for decision-making and social contexts was explored by conference keynote speaker Marina Baldissera Pacchetti (University College London and Barcelona Supercomputing Center). Baldissera Pacchetti proposed that the usability of climate information is undermined by a belief it is ‘objective’, free from value-judgements and based on a ‘physics first’ approach. To shift toward more useable information, a focus on co-creation of climate information is needed. She posed questions around how resources are allocated appropriately, the need to invest in local knowledge and expertise as well as training hard scientists in social science approaches to deliver to those who will use their data for adaptation.
Final thoughts
Elissa Waters presents on the Enablers of Best Practice project.
The conference was a timely reminder of the importance of understanding and addressing the social context of adaptation, including the development of climate information and services to support it. It also highlighted the social complexity and barriers to adaptation. The Enablers of Best Practice Adaptation project team are working to understand how the concepts of best practice adaptation might be integrated into adaptation application to help build transformative adaptation.