ARTICLE IN PRESS
Global Environmental Change 15 (2005) 75–76
www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha
Editorial
Adapting to climate change: perspectives across scales
There has been an explosion of interest in adaptation
to climate change over the past five years. Since initial
work for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC
(Smit and Pilifosova, 2001) demonstrated that adaptation is both important and complex, there has been an
increasing focus on documenting adaptations as they
happen and explaining the processes by which adaptation can occur, hopefully successfully. The explosion of
interest has therefore occurred for two main reasons.
The first reason is because adaptation is happening
today; decisions are being made in boardrooms, living
rooms and government offices about how to adapt to
current changes. From decisions on premiums by
insurance companies, through to decisions to engineer
buildings for a warmer climate, adaptation is occurring.
These decisions and processes of adaptation often
proceed even without explicit recognition that the
changes in variability faced are consistent with or
attributable to human induced climate change (Reilly
and Schimmelpfennig, 2000; Kane and Yohe, 2000). The
question is being asked: what is effective adaptation?
The second reason for increasing interest in adaptation to climate change relates to the global discussions
on the role of adaptation as an alternative to mitigation,
i.e., minimising the causes of human-induced climate
change. This issue is often framed as whether adaptation
can substitute for mitigation and provide more ‘breathing space’ for global emissions trajectories, rather than
in placing risk management as central to the global
problematic and the recognition of the joint determinants of the ability to adapt and to mitigate (Yohe,
2001, 2004; Yohe et al., 2004).
In both of these areas of concern (effective adaptation
decision-making and global response), issues of future
potential adaptation, its social and institutional organisation, and technical and social limits to adaptation are
critical. These debates uniform global negotiations on
both responsibility and funding for adaptation (Smith
et al., 2003). They also impinge on the relative role of
different stakeholders in actual adaptation of implementation.
Despite this growth in demand for information on
adaptation options and the potential for adaptation as a
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response to climate change, so far only two major
collections on adaptation have so far been published
(a special issue of Climatic Change published in 2000
(Kane and Yohe, 2000) and a book edited by Smith
et al. (2003)).
This special issue of Global Environmental Change
presents some emerging conceptual and empirical
advances in the understanding of adaptation to climate
change, at a range of spatial scales. These include
explicit consideration of the role of climate information
in adaptation planning—who knows what and who
needs to know what for effective adaptation actions to
proceed? Empirical evidence on how information on
climate risks has been used in adaptation decisions
demonstrates (in the papers by Conway and Tompkins)
that adaptation proceeds in a piecemeal fashion with
both individual interests and collective senses of risk
involved in using scenarios or experience in implementing change.
Adger et al. (2005a) examine criteria for the definition
of ‘‘successful’’ adaptation, showing how they vary with
spatial scale and are interpreted and weighted differently
by different interest groups. Brooks et al. (2005) and
Haddad (2005) both explore factors affecting adaptive
capacity at the national scale. Brooks et al. (2005)
describe a set of calibrated indicators of adaptive
capacity, showing that adaptive capacity is associated
primarily not with measures of wealth, but indicators of
governance, civil and political rights, and literacy.
Haddad (2005), however, shows how national adaptive
capacity varies with national socio-political goals, and
different weightings given to different indicators produce different maps of adaptive capacity. Conway
(2005) and Tompkins (2005) examine how responses to
past climatic variability in the Nile Basin (variability in
river flows) and the Cayman Islands (hurricanes)
influence adaptation to future climate change. Tompkins (2005), for example, shows how support networks,
strong governance and willingness to learn have
increased the resilience of the Cayman Islands to
hurricane impact. This resilience was witnessed after
Hurricane Ivan passed through the Caribbean in
September 2004. In comparison with other islands
ARTICLE IN PRESS
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Editorial / Global Environmental Change 15 (2005) 75–76
which experienced similar winds, rain and flooding, the
Cayman Islands fared relatively well. Nonetheless,
learning is on-going as the recovery process has proved
difficult and not without problems. The roles of local
institutions and governance structures are also illustrated by Næss colleagues (2005) review of municipal
response to the changing flood hazard in Norway: they
show how aims and objectives at one level are not
necessarily applied at another.
Issues of equity and justice are widely discussed in
terms of emissions targets, but have only recently
become seen to be vitally important in developing
adaptation strategies (Adger et al., 2005b). Thomas and
Twyman (2005) show how the distribution of the costs
and benefits of adapting to climate change in resourcedependent societies in southern Africa depend on the
interactions between inequitable natural resource use
policies and community-based natural resource management programmes. Finally, Dessai et al. (2005) consider
the use of climate scenarios for adaptation planning in
practice, presenting real-world examples of different
ways in which scenarios can be used: they show that the
role played by scenarios depends on the approach to
adaptation adopted and the financial and technical
capacity to handle scenario information.
The papers in this special issue address a diversity of
adaptation issues and take a range of approaches. This
emphasises and illustrates the diversity of the factors
affecting adaptation and the ability to adapt: these are
based not only on geographical context, but also on
social and political conditions and drivers. Taken
together, the papers emphasise the significance of scale
in understanding, explaining and enhancing adaptation
(see also Wilbanks, 2002). Scale affects the criteria
defining ‘‘successful’’ adaptation, and determines the
relevance of different factors influencing adaptive
capacity: indicators calculated at one scale may hide
substantial variations in adaptive capacity at another.
Scale affects the fundamental conceptualisation of
equity and justice. Again, assessments of the differential
burden of adaptation within a country would offer a
different perspective than assessments of differences
between countries. Scale determines the construction
and the implementation of adaptation policies, with
actions and plans at the national level significantly
affected by local institutional issues. Finally, scale
influences the appropriate technical tools for the
assessment of adaptation options. A lesson from this
collection of papers is that complexity in adaptation is
brought about by multiple scales of interaction between
human and environmental systems. This complexity has
significant implications for public policy given that
decision-makers within governance hierarchies are always reticent to embrace institutional solutions at lower
levels of scale. At the same time, local solutions are not
always readily scaleable to other levels of decisionmaking. Adaptation presents formidable challenges to
governance, science and ultimately to the sustainability
of society and the environment on which it depends.
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W. Neil Adger, Nigel W. Arnell, Emma L. Tompkins
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK and
University of Southampton,
Southampton, UK