How to make climate change research relevant for Indigenous communities in Torres Strait,Australia

Several Torres Strait communities have significant infrastructure and sacred sites located only a few metres above sea level. As a consequence, these areas are vulnerable to erosion due to the projected increase in storm surge intensity caused by climate change. Common sense suggests that Islanders would welcome new scientific research about how climate change might affect them, in order to understand the significance of these impacts and the timeframes involved. However, one leader has taken a seemingly counterintuitive stance, and has refused to let new climate research occur. We explore why this position was taken, and the implications of this decision for ongoing scientific research. In order to carry out this analysis, we provide a contextual background by assessing Islanders' recent experience with scientific researchers, and the response of policy-makers to it. We find that despite a clearly documented problem with “top-down” decision-making, this process remains. In this instance, we find that there is a systemic lack of collaboration with Islanders to allow them to prioritise their concerns, and a lack of adequate resources to allow them to build their resilience to climate impacts. We conclude that only through a genuine collaborative approach to climate adaptation can activities be properly developed, prioritised and undertaken.     

Place influences in framing and understanding climate change adaptation challenges

The climate change literature emphasises the importance of geographical understanding for guiding adaptation, in which “place” perspectives are particularly significant. After “scale”, the term “place” within the climate change adaptation literature is most often implicitly used in reference to a delineated and localised region, such as place-based risk assessment or place-based adaptation planning. Here, we use a case study of the Australian island-state of Tasmania to demonstrate the importance and particularity of place in the formation of climate change adaptation issues, problem definition and framing, and the dynamics of knowledge and praxis development across a range of research and industry sectors. We describe the significance of the place Tasmania with regard to its geographical location; its portrayal as an island place; and its cultural meaning and relations. Through a synthesis of climate change adaptation research, policy literature and engagement with researchers and stakeholders, we identify three emergent thematic place characterisations of Tasmania. We find that these characterisations have contributed directly or indirectly to the: initiation and extent of research and practical activities; the framing of adaptation issues and perspectives on potential adaptation responses in different sectors including the marine biodiversity and resources sector, small business and human health sectors. Exposing these influences is essential for focusing future adaptation activities, including research, planning, investment and practice, in Tasmania and other locations where place is a central issue.     

Mainstreaming climate change adaptation at the local level

National authorities in many countries aim at having climate change adaptation mainstreamed into existing policy domains in order to achieve coherence and synergies, and to avoid mal-adaptation. Because of local variations in climate change impacts, the lion's share of climate adaptation work will have to take place at the local level. This means also that the mainstreaming process needs to occur locally. This article examines the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation into existing sectors in five Norwegian municipalities. Applying theories of mainstreaming and policy integration we find that policy development is slower, but perhaps more robust in the municipalities that have chosen a horizontal, cross-sectoral approach to mainstreaming than in the municipalities that have chosen a vertical sector approach to mainstreaming.     

Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective

Although transformational change is a rather new topic in climate change adaptation literature, it has been studied in organisational theory for over 30 years. This paper argues that governance scholars can learn much from organisation theory, more specifically regarding the conceptualisation of change and intervention strategies. We reconceptualise the divide between transformational change and incremental change by questioning the feasibility of changes that are concurrently in-depth, large scale, and quick; and the assumption that incremental change is necessarily slow and can only result in superficial changes. To go beyond this dichotomy, we introduce the conceptualisation of continuous transformational change. Resulting intervention strategies include (1) providing basic conditions for enabling small in-depth wins; (2) amplifying small wins through sensemaking, coupling, and integrating; and (3) unblocking stagnations by confronting social and cognitive fixations with counterintuitive interventions. These interventions necessitate a modest leadership. Governing transformational change thus requires transformation of the governance systems themselves.     

Transformative climate change adaptation: bridging existing approaches with post-foundational insights on justice

ABSTRACT

Climate adaptation is a complex policy domain, spanning multiple sectors, scales and actors, and wherein those most at risk have the least power. The influence of linear positivist models of science uptake are proving ineffective in a world with increasingly concentrated wealth and power, institutional barriers, and rapidly growing risks facing the many. A plurality of approaches is needed to better examine those dynamics of climate adaptation which are often invisible in models of science uptake – equity, the value of contestation, path dependency – and to consider how to empower communities to find solutions. In this conceptual paper, we argue that bridging existing positivist and interpretivist methods with insights from post-foundational theory so as to underpin pluralism and re-orient ethical principles of justice, strengthens the capacity of social research to support transformative climate adaptation. Principles are proposed to facilitate such bridging.     

Policy design,spatial planning and climate change adaptation: a case study from Australia

There are gaps in the existing climate change adaptation literature concerning the design of spatial planning instruments and the relationship between policy instruments and the sociopolitical barriers to adaptation reform. To help address this gap, this article presents a typology of spatial planning instruments for adaptation and analyses the pattern of instrument choice in Australian planning processes in order to shed light on contextual factors that can impede adaptation. The analysis highlights how policy design can amplify the barriers to adaptation by arranging policy actors in ways inimical to reform and stripping decision makers of the instruments necessary to make and sustain desired policy changes.     

Understanding urban vulnerability,adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change

This paper introduces a special issue of Local Environment that has arisen through collaboration between academic researchers and the Urban Planning and Design Branch of UN-Habitat, focused on how we can understand and respond to the challenges of urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change. The paper establishes the existing state of the art in the field, and considers critical challenges that are emerging in the research-based literature. In this context, it introduces UN-Habitat's Cities and Climate Change Initiative and reflects on the lessons learnt and challenges ahead, drawing on insights from across the papers in the special issue. In conclusion, it identifies the role of international/transnational co-operation, the relation between adaptation and mitigation, issues of multi-level governance and the ways in which change in urban socio-technical systems might be achieved as critical issues across the science/policy interface where increased dialogue and the co-production of knowledge needs to focus in order to advance this agenda.     

Barriers and enablers to climate change adaptation in hierarchical governance systems: the case of Vietnam

Governments fulfil important roles in increasing the adaptive capacity of local communities to respond to climate change impacts, particularly in developing countries. Existing studies on how governments enable and constrain the ways in which local level communities learn and build their adaptive capacity, however, generally adopt network or market-oriented types of governance. However, the most vulnerable regions to climate change impact in the world are generally governed through hierarchical policy systems. This research aims to understand how the hierarchical policy system in Vietnam creates enables and/or constrains the policy capacity of policy actors to contribute to effective climate change adaptation. We conducted interviews (n?=?26) with key actors at multiple levels of government. Our findings show the importance of clear legal institutions, available financing for implementing policies, and the training of governmental staff, particularly at district and commune levels where the policy capacities are generally too low to deal with climate change impacts. We conclude that any efforts to support local actors (i.e. smallholder farmers) should include investments in policy capacity to ensure uptake and upscaling of adaptation actions more broadly.     

Objectives of public economic policy and the adaptation to climate change

Much can be learned about adaptation by applying structures and methodologies already used in other research fields. This study employs a public economic policy approach to investigate how – or if at all – adaptation should be supported by the public sector. Three different fields of adaptation activity are identified which are especially relevant for government intervention and the study proposes ways in which government intervention could be conducted. The analysis takes into account that developing regions are particularly vulnerable and they have insufficient funds to adequately adapt to climate change.     

Understanding climate,adapting to change: indigenous cultural values and climate change impacts in North Queensland

Many authors have suggested that Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, yet there remains a paucity of fine-grained geographic data on the particular impacts of climate change on specific places and on local communities, especially Australian Indigenous communities. While there are some recent studies being undertaken with Australia's Torres Strait Island people, our research takes up the issues of vulnerability and resilience with two Indigenous communities from different environments on the mainland in North Queensland. They are the Aboriginal peoples of the rainforest and reef environments of the Wet Tropics and the Aboriginal people of the discontiguous rainforest, grasslands, dry forests and marine environments of Cape York. The results demonstrate variability in their understandings of climate change and in their capacities to anticipate and manage its impacts, while at the same time illustrating some common held themes about environmental and cultural values, observed environmental change, attributions of cause and effect, and of climate in general.     

Embeddedness of climate change adaptation: established procedures and contending discourses for flood protection in Espoo,Finland

Calls for more stakeholder participation and cooperation, the acknowledgement of uncertainties as well as for flexible and robust solutions have become frequent in the literature on climate change adaptation. Recent studies show that these calls are taken up only reluctantly in local adaptation compared to sectoral and technical solutions. The aim of this study is to examine to which extent adaptation as an embedded process within the local context allows for stakeholder participation, cooperation and the robustness and flexibility of adaptation measures. It applies an analytical approach, combining an action framework of adaptation and document-based discourse analysis, to assess both the procedural and the substantive viewpoint of an adaptation case in Finland. This twofold approach provides insight into how the adaptation process and content influence and condition each other. The analysis highlights how new approaches to adaptation have to compete with prevailing discourses and institutionalised practices, as public authorities take the dominant role in adaptation, striving for certain and safe solutions. This process has few participatory elements and leaves little leeway to address uncertainty.     

Insurance sector management of climate change adaptation in three Nordic countries: the influence of policy and market factors

The insurance industry is important for facilitating climate change adaptation. Insurance companies’ involvement is, however, influenced by national adaptation policy. The literature suggests that especially policy factors – government interventions, political priorities and public–private cooperation – and market factors – cost offset, cost mitigation, planning flexibility and business opportunities – shape private actor approaches. To increase the understanding of insurance company involvement in adaptation, this study examines how insurance companies’ approaches are influenced by policy and market factors in three countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The study found that the policy factors tested significantly shaped the approaches of the companies assessed, while market factors currently appear less influential. This is likely due to the absence of climate risk and adaptation in political debates and among insurance policyholders. The study discusses the potential role of the insurance industry in adaptation governance and suggests how barriers facing insurance companies could be overcome.     

Integrating climate change adaptation into Dutch local policies and the role of contextual factors

Moving towards a more sustainable adaptation process requires closer integration of policies related to the environment. An important actor in this is the local government. This paper examines to what extend adaptation is currently being integrated into Dutch local policies, and what the role is of a municipality's size, risk and experience in the encountered manifestations of adaptation. First, it was determined that adaptations taking place only anticipate currently perceivable weather extremes – mostly increasing precipitation. Second, it was determined that the realisation of further adaptations is hindered by a strongly sectoral divided reality. Adaptation is now heavily dominated by the water department, while spatial planning and the environment are only limitedly involved. Finally, it was observed that the contextual factor size proved to most important for horizontal policy integration, whereas the contextual factor extreme-weather experience was the most definite for the realisation of adaptations. We conclude that a more sustainable adaptation should first tackle the sectoral divides which requires administrative efforts, for example, professional training. These would preferably be initiated from a vertical direction.     

Barriers and guidelines for public policies on climate change adaptation: A missed opportunity of scientific knowledge‐brokerage

Progress in formulating and implementing effective adaptation policies is often hampered by a wide variety of barriers that are well documented in the literature. Among the barriers are lack of awareness, certainty, resources and political commitment. Since these and other barriers can be overcome (e.g., by raising awareness, closing knowledge gaps, and increasing resources), numerous decision‐support frameworks (mainly written guidelines) have been developed for this purpose. The present paper takes stock of both the barriers in adaptation policymaking, as documented in the literature, and the guidelines that aim to facilitate public policies on climate change adaptation. It then compares to what degree selected adaptation guidelines serve as knowledge‐brokerage tools that provide guidance on how to overcome the barriers addressed in the scientific literature. The comparison shows that adaptation guidelines address barriers of adaptation policymaking neither comprehensively nor systematically. Since most adaptation guidelines focus on (subjective) experiences with good practices than on empirical research findings, we conclude that they represent a missed opportunity of scientific knowledge‐brokerage in climate change adaptation.     

Exploring the autonomous adaptation strategies to climate change and climate variability in selected villages in the rural northern savannah zone of Ghana

Evidence abounds attesting to changes in the global climate. In Ghana, climate change and climate variability have brought several exposure-sensitivities on different people and at different times. Due to the multiplicity of climate change and climate variability effects, adaptation strategies invariably could be influenced by several factors. This paper assesses the adoption of adaptation strategies in the rural northern savannah zone of Ghana as a result of climate change and variability. Using two villages each from Savelugu Nanton, West Mamprusi and Kassena Nankana East Districts, which are slightly different as case studies, the paper unearthed panoply of varied adaptation strategies in each of them including intensification of irrigation; integration of livestock production; changes in tillage practices; fertiliser application on farms; shift from agriculture to non-farm jobs; seasonal migration and purchase of drought insurance for maize. The results indicate that the relativity in adoption and utilisation of the different adaptive strategies are interlinked with geographical, social, economic, institutional and political factors and processes in the villages. The findings drum home the essentiality of location-specific planned adaptation strategies for climate change through a bottom-up approach, in order to ensure their effectiveness and sustainability.     

Context-dependent evaluation of climate change policies: competing policies,knowledge and emotions

Climate change policies can compete with policies on other social and environmental problems for limited economic resources. This paper investigates the potential influence of alternative policies on citizens’ preferences for climate change policies. A contingent valuation study was implemented to estimate the impact of observable and unobservable contextual effects of competing polices on climate change valuation. Individuals are also investigated about their endowment of knowledge and emotional reactions to such problems. The results show that citizens’ valuation of climate change policies crucially depends on the context-dependent competing policies. The valuation rises as the number of competing policies increases. This increment becomes economically significant when the competing policies are related to specific problems such as forest fires and development. In addition, the valuation also rises with the amount of knowledge endowed by the individual about the climate change problem, and with the experience of negative emotions such as fear and sadness.     

Governing Quasi-Public Network Services for adaptation to climate change

Adaptation takes place in both private and public sectors, or as an interrelation between the two, and often under the realm of public regulation. Thispaper uses the Swedish and the Norwegian electricity grid sector, as providers of a vital public good under strict public regulation, to analyse reforms' effects on adaptive capacity in this area. The paper shows that transformational changes in both sectors during the 1990s shifted both the formal organisational structure (rules and regulations), as well as the organisational culture, in the direction of economic efficiency. These two dimensions individually reduced adaptive capacity to climate change, although differently in the two countries. However, the formal structure and organisational culture also yielded substantial influence on each other. This leads to the conclusion that when designing public regulations and implementing reforms, organisational culture must be considered in the design. Also the paper contests previous findings in the literature by showing that under given conditions there exist some substitution between the two dimensions in influencing adaptive capacity, implying that both dimensions should be included when analysing adaptation since analysing them in isolation is likely to lead to wrong conclusions.     

Communication and use of climate scenarios for climate change adaptation in Finland,Sweden and Norway

This paper assesses the communication and the use of climate scenarios at the science–science and science–policy interface in Finland, Sweden and Norway. It is based on document analysis and stakeholder questionnaires. The questionnaires targeted three stakeholder groups, all engaged in the communication and the use of climate scenario information: climate scenario producers; impact, adaptation and vulnerability (IAV) experts; and policy-makers. The respondents were asked to identify issues associated with the communication of scenarios and other needs pertaining to the usefulness and availability of such information. Despite the relatively long history of climate change adaptation in the three countries, climate scenarios are not utilised to their full potential. Climate scenarios have been used in awareness raising, problem understanding and strategy development. However, far less examples can be found on adaptation actions, particularly on harnessing the benefits of climate change. The communication between climate scenario producers and IAV experts functions well; however, communication between climate researchers and policy-makers is less efficient. Each country has developed boundary services to enhance dissemination of the climate scenario information to policy-makers. They are cost-efficient but do not necessarily enhance the comprehension of the information and encourage the actual dialogue between scenario producers and the end-users. Further translation of scenario information to impact and vulnerability estimates together with established boundary work could improve the use of climate research information. As adaptation policy in these countries further progresses towards implementation, there are increasing expectations of support from research, further challenging the communication of climate scenarios.     

A framework for assessing the accountability of local governance arrangements for adaptation to climate change

Accountability has hardly been studied in the governance of climate change adaptation. This paper develops a framework for assessing the accountability of interactive governance arrangements for local adaptation. This framework is based on five important accountability mechanisms: Clear responsibilities and mandates, Transparency, Political oversight, Citizen control and Checks and sanctions. For illustration purposes, the proposed framework is applied to the case of a Dutch local adaptation governance arrangement. The application shows that the five proposed mechanisms and their operationalizations offer a valid assessment of the accountability of such arrangements. It also raises some challenges, such as the tensions between accountability and flexibility, legitimacy and effectiveness; the potentially important roles of trust and of the political skills of central actor(s) in the arrangement in raising accountability, and the potential need to distinguish between arrangements for policy planning and for service delivery.     

Perceptions of climate change on the Island of Providencia

Climate change-related impacts have the capacity to substantially influence Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean. Currently, many SIDS are engaged in large-scale vulnerability assessments that aim to identify, analyse, and inform solutions to mitigate climate change-related impacts. Many of these assessments, while useful, place little emphasis on the local stakeholders' perceptions of climate change. One such Caribbean community impacted by climate-related change is Providence Island in Colombia. Using a vulnerability assessment framework (Marshall, P.A. et al. 2010. A framework for social adaptation to climate change: sustaining tropical coastal communities and industries. Gland: IUCN Publication Services), researchers interviewed island residents (N = 23) about their perceptions of climate change, impacts on the local environment, and how the island community may adapt. All interviews were transcribed and analysed using a priori and open coding to identify patterns of and relationships between stakeholders' responses. Results indicate that local perceptions of climate change are linked to (1) environmental knowledge, (2) environmental awareness, attitudes, and beliefs, and (3) perceptions of risk. Implications for local adaptive strategies, education, communication, and suggestions for engagement at the local level are discussed.