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

generic human process of development. The vastness of climate change and the multitude of pathways through which it can affect life and wellbeing for any individual or organisation make it almost impossible for ‘climate change’ in a holistic sense to be the target of adaptation. In comparison, international targets for mitigation are relatively simple. Rather, people and agencies tend to adapt to local expressions of climate change – flood events, changing crop yields or disease vector ecologies, often without attributing impacts or adaptation to climate change. This again makes identification, communication and ultimately the development of supporting governance structures for climate change adaptation a challenge unless such efforts are integrated into everyday activities and structures of policy-making.
The antecedents of adaptation
    The notion of adapting to environmental stress and shock has been the focus of previous rounds of academic investigation from fields outside climate change. To varying degrees the ideas generated have been recognised and incorporated in the development of the idea within the climate change community. Jeffry and McIntosh (2006) identify relevant literature dispersed across economics (industry sector dynamics, innovation processes and risk-taking behaviour), psychology (characteristics of inventors and risk takers), philosophy of science (roles of innovation/invention), sociology (population dynamics, sociology of groups and networks), anthropology (collapse of complex societies) and evolutionary theory (role of diversity and adaptation in survival).
    Despite the rich inheritance of contemporary writing on adaptation to climate change this is rarely explicitly noted. Four streams of thinking on adaptation are examined in this section; the first historical, the others still in use and interacting with the climate change adaptation discourse, but all largely outside the mainstream of writing on climate change adaptation. First to be reviewed here are those perspectives on adaptation that have drawn from the ecological systems(cybernetics and coevolution). This strategy has its roots in early sustainable development theory building with efforts to overcome the false dualism of nature and society. Second is a body of work that uses the language of adaptation and learning to describe policy development over time (adaptive management). Third are those approaches that have come from the interface of international development, governance and disaster studies (coping).
    Together these antecedents of the contemporary debate on adaptation in the climate change community make up a conceptual backdrop, one with which to contextualise contemporary literature on adaptation to climate change, and to identify gaps and repetition in the development of the idea and its critiques.
Cybernetics
    Academic geography has a long history of engagement with adaptation. In the 1970s and ’80s this was first explicitly formulated as part of an experiment with cybernetic theory. Cybernetics drew on evolutionary theory to connect analysis of social and natural systems. It was in part a response to the preceding schools of regional geography and human ecology studies that tended to present the environment as little more than background, assuming its malleability to human intervention. Cybernetics sought to provide a more integrated approach to human–environment relations, and one that could be engaged with in a quantitative manner and so exploit the new computer modelling capacities emerging at that time. Natural disasters, including slow onset drought and food security events, were used to exemplify the need for the more integrated approach offered by cybernetics. Given that the cybernetic approach and contemporary resiliency school (see Chapter 3 ) have similar roots in ecological theory, the criticisms levelled at cybernetics are especially worthy of consideration.
    In 1975, Vayda and McCay first advocated adaptation