Climate Adaptation for Resilient Communities

“Resilience works,” trumpeted the Seattle PI in a May 2008 editorial, “Climate Change at Home: A Time to Thrive.” The occasion was a workshop hosted by the Center for Clean Air Policy that brought together representatives from eight North American cities to compare notes on adapting to climate change. Next month, on February 21st and 22nd, the Climate Prosperity Project will host similar gathering in San Jose, California.

These two organizations – and a growing list of others – are taking a powerfully strategic approach to climate change work. They are localizing a global issue. And they are reframing it as a challenge to innovation.

In this perspective, I explore the idea and practice of adaptation to climate change, starting with its relationship to mitigation. Along the way, I survey a range of materials that have caught our attention. And then I suggest some areas for further inquiry.

Mitigation and Adaptation
Mitigation means efforts to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions. These efforts include individual actions, like eating less meat, as well as systemic approaches, like a cap-and-trade system. Changes in land use practices, so that soils or forests store more carbon, count as mitigation as well.

Adaptation efforts, on the other hand, seek to anticipate and respond to likely climate change impacts. Temperature and precipitation patterns, crop viabilities, sea levels, and the spread of diseases will all be affected by a human-influenced global climate regime. If negative impacts are to be minimized, each of these shifts will require responses.

These two strategies play out at a variety of geographic scales. Although individuals can act to reduce their carbon footprints and some piecemeal carbon regulations are in effect, mitigation is fundamentally a global effort, since greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are indistinguishable by earthly sources. At the same time, because climate impacts are place-specific, adaptation is necessarily a local and regional effort. Yet adaptation also presents an issue of global equity, as the world’s poor are the most vulnerable to climate impacts.

Co-benefits represent another relationship between the two strategies. Well-insulated buildings, for instance, both lighten carbon footprints (a mitigation, of global consequence) and hedge against disruptions in energy supplies (an adaptation, of local consequence). This diagram from the Clean Air Partnership illustrates some intersecting pay offs.

It is worth noting how unfamiliar and jargon-y these ideas can sound. “Relative to mitigation, the adaptation challenge is much less well understood,” write environmental hazards expert Ian Burton and colleagues in a 2006 Pew report (pdf). And earlier this month, the New York Times City Room blog satirized the city’s Transit Authority on its plan for a “Climate Adaptation Resiliency Evaluation Procedure.” Ouch!

Adaptation Angst
Until quite recently, the adaptation question was considered “impolite,” a distraction from the real work of cutting emissions, relates Christina Larson at The New Republic blog.

Writing about natural disaster and climate change preparedness on the Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin notes two observations on the difficulties of adaptation. First, people are not good judges of risk. We often discount all but the most direct experiences. (See psychologist Elke Weber’s paper on “Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us [Yet]” [pdf].) And second, our political cultures tend to favor high-profile responses, as compared with diligent preparations, which often go unnoticed.

Yet some climate change is inevitable, and the risks to familiar life patterns are real. “Climate Adaptation: Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-making” (pdf), from the UK Climate Impacts Program, presents a detailed framework for appraising options and making choices that best minimize regret – whatever scenario might come to pass.

Resilient Cities
The word resilience is sometimes used interchangeably with adaptation or to describe the goal of adaptive strategies. And when it comes to resilience, cities are getting a lot of attention.

In this Smart City interview, Thomas Campanella, co-editor of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, emphasizes the social factors that support resilience, like equity, education and transparency. In Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, Peter Newman and colleagues focus largely on urban planning approaches, including: renewable energy, transit diversity, and decentralized water and waste systems.

Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon takes a broad view of resilience-building strategies in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. He advocates: reduce stresses like income gaps, cultivate foresight and ingenuity, attend to critical systems like food networks, and work in local municipalities and communities to anticipate breakdowns.

Synthesis reports of urban initiatives and successes have been published by: ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), Clean Air Partnership (pdf), and Post Carbon Institute. Also of note are: King County, Washington’s “Preparing for Climate Change: A Guidebook for Local Regional and State Governments” (pdf), the Greater London Authority’s “Adapting to Climate Change: A Checklist for Development” (pdf), and The Heinz Center’s “Survey of Climate Change Adaptation Planning” (pdf).

Community-Based Adaptation
While municipal governments are often recognized as agents of adaptation, other agents are important as well. In fact, a 2008 World Bank review (pdf) of responses to environmental challenges finds that, of 118 cases in 46 countries, the institutions involved are more often civic than governmental.

Community-based adaptation, a term gaining international usage and adopted by the UK Institute of Development Studies for their Eldis database, emphasizes the socially embedded nature of responses to environmental challenges.

One group working to cross-pollinate approaches to community-scale adaptation throughout the English-speaking world is the Ireland-based (Totnes, England-based) Transition Network, whose founder Rob Hopkins recently authored The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience.

Bringing it All Back Home
Here are a few areas for further exploration. Please join me in following these paths or identifying others.

• Any quibbles with the mitigation/adaptation diagram? The activities on the diagram are largely governmental in nature, as it reflects the work of the Clean Air Partnership. How would the diagram be further developed to include civic society? In other words: Consider activities that reduce emissions. Are they also adaptive? Then, think of adaptive activities. Do they also reduce emissions?
• With this diagramming exercise in mind, would any organization working on, say, food, water or equity issues in the adaptation circle, but not also working in the mitigation overlap, count as a climate change organization? Any thoughts on this “big tent” approach to defining climate change work?
• On terminology, one problem with the word adaptation is that it is open to multiple interpretations. A proactive interpretation, meaning adaptation as precaution, is different from a wait-and-see interpretation, meaning adaptation that is undertaken only as it becomes necessary. One paper that offers insights on this topic is “Network Structure, Diversity, and Proactive Resilience Building,” in which authors Lenore Newman and Ann Dale challenge the old maxim: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Invention (innovation) is one means of adaptation, they write, and its practice need not wait until necessity arrives. Any thoughts on these words?
• Vandana Shiva has reframed a “low carbon” or “carbon neutral” world as a “carbon-rich” future. If you haven’t read Tom Philpott’s report on Shiva’s 2008 Terra Madre talk, I recommend taking a look. Similar thinking has informed the naming of the aforementioned Climate Prosperity Project. And as readers may know, I was involved for several years with Ecotrust’s celebration-of-place campaign, called Salmon Nation. What is the role in climate adaptation for celebration? In what ways might one envision the coming years as “a time to thrive”?

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Special thanks to Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz for research support and stimulating discussions on this topic.