Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation by Mark Pelling Read Free Book Online

not undertaken in response to a perceived risk (a hazard event for which a social actor is both exposed and susceptible) vulnerability will remain unchallenged.
    The three levels of adaptation are nested and compounding. Nesting allows higher-order change to facilitate lower-order change so that transformative change in a social system could open scope for local transitions and resilience. Compounding reflects the potential for lower-order changes to stimulate or hinder higher-order change. Building resilience can provoke reflection and be upscaled with consequent changes across a management regime, enabling transitional and potentially transformative change – but it could also slow down more profound change as incremental adjustments offset immediate risks while the system itself moves ever closer to a critical threshold for collapse. On the ground mosaics of adaptation are generated from the outcomes of overlapping efforts to build (and resist) resilience, transition, local transformative change and remaining unmet vulnerabilities; mosaics that can change over time as underlying hazards and vulnerabilities as well as adaptive capacity and action change driven by local and top-down pressures.
    The discussion of terms so far has been generic with climate change leading potentially to opportunities as well as threats. On the ground opportunities arise for some actors from even the most catastrophic of climate change associated events. This is especially so when accountability and transparency are limited, as they are post-disaster creating gross market distortions: following Hurricane Katrina, a contracting company Shaw charged FEMA US$175 a square foot for temporary roof repairs, material costs were provided by the USA government and workers paid as little as US$2 a square foot (Klein, 2007). Elsewhere increased rainfall and temperatures may extend the growing season, leading to locally increased agricultural productivity, particularly in developed countries that can also capitalise on technological innovation leading to local benefit but further global inequality (UNDP, 2007). There may be more benign opportunities from climate change that need not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions or exaggerate social inequality (such as crop reselection), but these appear trivial compared to present and predicted costs. The annual impact from natural disasters associated with climate change alone accounts for tens of thousands of deaths, millions of people affected and billions of US$ lost, with drought, flooding, temperature shocks and wind storms causing the greatest impacts (Guha-Sapir
et al.
, 2004). By 2080 the number of additional people at risk of hunger could reach 600 million (Hansen, 2007). Climate change threatens the MillenniumDevelopment Goals and most especially the development prospects of a large section of humanity. UNDP (2007) argues that some 40 per cent of the world’s population, over 2.6 billion people, will be consigned to a future of reduced opportunity without action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. With this context, our focus on adaptation is primarily as a mechanism to avoid harm.
    The impacts of climate change will be felt directly (weather related and sea-level rise events), indirectly (through the knock-on consequences of reduced access to basic needs as critical infrastructure is damaged or employment lost) and as systems perturbations (the local implications of impacts on global commodity prices or international migration). Adaptation therefore needs to insert itself to ameliorate vulnerability caused by each level of impact. However, as one moves from direct through indirect to systems perturbations, climate change impacts interact with other systems features such as development policy, demography and cultural norms. This makes it increasingly hard to identify and communicate the consequences of climate change in isolation so that adaptation becomes both a climate change specific and more