Adaptation to climate change continues to rise on the agendas of researchers, practitioners, and decisionmakers, driven by growing evidence that climate change is real, already observable, and threatening to undermine development. Any effective development and planning process will need to take climate adaptation into account and, conversely, adaptation efforts themselves will often require development interventions to succeed. This paper explores the link between the climate adaptation agenda and the development agenda, building on evidence from more than 130 case studies in developing countries.
While climate impacts are increasingly observed, the debate over managing adaptation has progressed very slowly. This in part is due to confusion about the relationship between adaptation and development—a definitional problem that has hindered not only project design, but also the allocation of funding for adaptation efforts. Notwithstanding the difficulty in developing a concise operational definition, failure to clarify this relationship has meant that funding mechanisms create redundancies or leave gaps in the landscape of critical adaptation and development activities.
Taking Stock of Global Adaptation Efforts
Drawing on Internet resources, the authors analyzed 135 examples of adaptation projects, policies, and other initiatives from the developing world. The review found:
- A significant area of overlap between adaptation and development is methodological. Rarely do adaptation efforts entail activities not found in the development “toolbox.” The uniquely “adaptive” elements of most efforts are those involved in defining problems, selecting strategies, and setting priorities—not in implementing solutions.
- In line with current approaches to development, adaptation efforts are highly integrated. Most projects utilize multiple strategies and address multiple sources of vulnerability. Many cross sectoral boundaries and address more than one impact associated with climate change.
There are three “models” of how adaptation and development objectives coincide:
- “Serendipitous” Adaptation: Activities undertaken to achieve development objectives incidentally achieve adaptation objectives. The adaptation components of a given activity may even be noticed or emphasized only after the fact.
- Climate-Proofing of Ongoing Development Efforts: Activities added to an ongoing development initiative to ensure its success under a changing climate. Adaptation thus serves as means to achieve development ends.
- Discrete Adaptation: Activities undertaken specifically to achieve climate adaptation objectives. Development activities may be used as means to achieve adaptation ends.
Two roughly distinct perspectives inform how people approach the challenge of adaptation: one focuses on creating response mechanisms to specific impacts associated with climate change, and the other on reducing vulnerability to climate change through building capacities that can help address a range of challenges, including the effects of climate change. In practice, many instances of adaptation fall between these extremes of orientation toward impacts- or vulnerability.
Framing Adaptation: A Continuum of Approaches
The range of adaptation activities may be framed as a continuum of responses to climate change, from “pure” development activities on the one hand to very explicit adaptation measures on the other. At one far end of the continuum, the most vulnerability-oriented adaptation efforts overlap almost completely with traditional development practice, where activities take little or no account of specific impacts associated with climate change. At the far opposite end, highly specialized activities exclusively target distinct climate change impacts, and fall outside the realm of development as we know it. In between lies a broad spectrum of activities with gradations of emphasis on vulnerability and impacts.
Continuum of Adaptation Activities: From Development to Climate Change
The continuum can be roughly divided into four types of adaptation efforts:
- Addressing the Drivers of Vulnerability At the development end of the spectrum, activities reduce poverty and address other fundamental shortages of capability that make people vulnerable to harm. Very little attention to specific climate change impacts is paid during these interventions, although they help to buffer households and communities against climate trends or shocks. Sample activities include efforts to improve livelihoods, literacy, and women’s rights, and even projects that address HIV/AIDS.
- Building Response Capacity Adaptation activities focus on building robust systems for problem solving. These capacity-building efforts lay the foundation for more targeted actions, and overlap substantially with many institutionbuilding and technological approaches familiar to the development community. Examples include the development of robust communications and planning processes, and the improvement of mapping, weather monitoring, and natural resource management practices.
- Managing Climate Risk Climate information is incorporated into decisions to reduce negative effects on resources and livelihoods, accommodating the fact that often the effects of climate change are not easily distinguished from the effects of hazards within the historic range of climate variability. Examples include disasterresponse planning activities, drought-resistant crops, and efforts to “climate-proof” physical infrastructure.
- Confronting Climate Change Actions focus almost exclusively on addressing impacts associated with climate change, typically targeting climate risks that are clearly outside historic climate variability, and with little bearing on risks that stem from anything other than anthropogenic climate change. Examples include communities that relocate in response to sea level rise, and responses to glacial melting.
Two factors appear to predominate in shaping the characterization of an adaptation response: (1) the existing capacity of the affected community, and (2) the level of information about projected climate impacts. Lower levels of capacity necessitate greater investment in addressing underlying sources of vulnerability (i.e., adaptation efforts focus more on the development end of the continuum). Higher certainty regarding climate change prediction enables efforts to more directly target specific impacts (i.e., on the climate-specific end of the continuum). However, it is important to note that neither of these drivers has a linear relationship to how closely adaptation efforts may target specific hazards or impacts.
Governance and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
As understanding of climate risk improves, adaptation experience grows, and the effects of climate change are felt more strongly, impacts-oriented approaches—especially climate risk-management approaches—seem likely to be implemented more widely. However, the effectiveness of climate risk management depends heavily upon the ability to reduce uncertainties linked with climate risk to a level at which risk management tools can be reliably implemented.
Unfortunately, many of the most vulnerable populations will not be able to approach climate risks in a standard risk-management sense; their core adaptation task will instead be to build the capacity to cope with uncertainty. Moreover, even when good climate risk information is available, it does not necessarily make adaptation decisions easier or better. A society’s adaptation decisions inevitably involve many intersecting —and often competing —values and interests. Fair and effective processes for weighing and resolving these play a central role in adaptation across the full spectrum of vulnerability- and impacts-based approaches.
Investment in institutions and decision-making processes that embody principles of good governance will provide a solid foundation for identifying adaptation priorities, making fair trade-offs and building resilience. While more attention has been paid to building processes and institutions to facilitate adaptation at the community level, establishing effective processes for adaptation decisionmaking at the national and sectoral levels is also needed. Policies that themselves adapt to changing conditions will provide a critical supporting environment for adaptation processes at all scales. Development of “adaptive policymaking” will require policymakers to treat policies as ongoing experimental and learning processes.
Managing uncertainty requires effective use of information at all scales and across the spectrum of emphasis on vulnerability and impacts. For example, geographical information plays a central role in adaptation planning, irrespective of whether the information mapped relates to sources of vulnerability or predicted changes in climate. Thus, mapping (e.g., for flood risk, soil moisture, poverty indicators, watershed boundaries) and other broadly relevant information (e.g., census data and historical and current weather records) play a central role in adaptation planning. The centrality of information argues for adaptation investments in communications infrastructure, as well as training to enable educators and the media to understand and interpret information relevant to climate adaptation.
Financing Adaptation
Funding for adaptation in developing countries flows mainly from two sources: dedicated multilateral adaptation funds and official development assistance (ODA). The dedicated adaptation funds have focused on climate-specific activities, while ODA focuses on the development-related agenda. In projects undertaken to date, ODA represents the far larger share. However, the universe of dedicated adaptation funds is now poised to grow, as national governments take on the adaptation agenda, as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Adaptation Fund nears its launch, and as Parties to the UNFCCC explore adaptation funding mechanisms for a post-2012 agreement.
Within the ODA community, dedicated adaptation funding streams are also being created. In addition to guidance on the importance of information, the need for adaptive policies, and the importance of local, national, and regional adaptation efforts, our analysis suggests:
- It is critical that funders include vulnerability-reduction and capacity-building activities in adaptation projects.
- Fostering inclusive, accountable decision-making is a central task, as decision-making processes are at the heart of effective adaptation, especially in the context of ensuring that policies are poised to adapt to the uncertain future.
- Many adaptation information needs have surprisingly little to do with climate prediction. Priorities for support include geographical information capacities, gathering and managing national census data, historical and current weather data, communications infrastructure, and the ability of educators and media personnel to understand and interpret climate information.
- Donor coordination is needed to ensure that gaps and redundancies are avoided as adaptation efforts progress.
