Ben Orlove

The Past, the Present and Some Possible Futures of Adaptation

Adaptation is a familiar word in the conversations of people who are concerned about climate change. They use it to the processes of adjusting to climate change and its impacts. It describes the actions that must be taken to reduce or eliminate harm, actions whose necessity is unquestionable once the realization strikes that no mitigation plan will be able to bring global warming to a quick halt. This chapter calls for some reflection on these uses of the word. Though it accepts the urgency of the need to respond to climate change, it questions the naturalness of the term adaptation – the way that it is taken for granted as a key element in climate change policy – and it finds some limits to the term. This chapter suggests that the word does not always capture the full impacts of climate change and that it does not always represent accurately either the perceptions of the people affected by these impacts or the range of alternatives open to them.This chapter develops these reservations through several sections: (1) a review of the history of the term and its use by international organizations; (2) a presentation of a local community affected by climate change, who constitute one case of the people for whom adaptations are proposed; (3) a discussion of the perceptions of climate change by this local community; (4) a review of four organizations that serve as intermediates between the international and local levels, and that have all adopted the word; and (5) a set of considerations on the way that the term operates in the relations among the international organizations, the intermediary organizations and the local community. Reduced to a single, if long, sentence, this chapter argues that the term serves the international and intermediary organizations far better than the local communities who feel the impacts most directly; rather than transforming the great fear of a hotter planet into sustained action to address the consequences of climate change , the term can create a sense of complacency.

Enhancing the Relevance of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Research

This paper discusses the role and relevance of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and the new scenarios that combine SSPs with representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) research. It first provides an overview of uses of social–environmental scenarios in IAV studies and identifies the main shortcomings of earlier such scenarios. Second, the paper elaborates on two aspects of the SSPs and new scenarios that would improve their usefulness for IAV studies compared to earlier scenario sets: (i) enhancing their applicability while retaining coherence across spatial scales, and (ii) adding indicators of importance for projecting vulnerability. The paper therefore presents an agenda for future research, recommending that SSPs incorporate not only the standard variables of population and gross domestic product, but also indicators such as income distribution, spatial population, human health and governance.

Dynamic Simulation as an Approach to Understanding Hurricane Risk Response: Insights from the Stormview Lab

This article investigates the use of dynamic laboratory simulations as a tool for studying decisions to prepare for hurricane threats. A prototype web-based simulation named Stormview is described that allows individuals to experience the approach of a hurricane in a computer-based environment. In Stormview participants can gather storm information through various media, hear the opinions of neighbors, and indicate intentions to take protective action. We illustrate how the ability to exert experimental control over the information viewed by participants can be used to provide insights into decision making that would be difficult to gain from field studies, such as how preparedness decisions are affected by the nature of news coverage of prior storms, how a storms movement is depicted in graphics, and the content of word-of-mouth communications. Data from an initial application involving a sample of Florida residents reveal a number of unexpected findings about hurricane risk response. Participants who viewed forecast graphics, which contained track lines depicting the most likely path of the storm, for example, had higher levels of preparation than those who saw graphics that showed only uncertainty cones-even among those living far from the predicted center path. Similarly, the participants who were most likely to express worry about an approaching storm and fastest to undertake preparatory action were those who, ironically, had never experienced one. Finally, external validity is evidenced by a close rank-order correspondence between patterns of information use revealed in the lab and that found in previous cross-sectional field studies.

The Dynamics of Hurricane Risk Perception: Real-Time Evidence from the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season

Findings are reported from two field studies that measured the evolution of coastal residents’ risk perceptions and preparation plans as two hurricanes — Isaac and Sandy — were approaching the United States coast during the 2012 hurricane season. The data suggest that residents threatened by such storms had a poor understanding of the threat posed by the storms; they over-estimated the likelihood that their homes would be subject to hurricane-force wind conditions, but under-estimated the potential damage that such winds could cause, and they misconstrued the greatest threat as coming from wind rather than water. These misperceptions translated into preparation actions that were not well commensurate with the nature and scale of the threat they faced, with residents being well prepared for a modest wind event of short duration but not for a significant wind-and-water catastrophe. Possible causes of the biases and policy implications for improving hurricane warning communication are discussed.

Glacier Retreat: Reviewing the Limits of Human Adaptation to Climate Change

(From the introduction) More than many other consequences of climate change, glacier retreat also is easily understood: temperatures warm, and ice melts. The negative consequences of glacier retreat for important issues — water resources, natural hazards, and landscapes — are also straightforward and clear, and significant agreement between expert and lay opinion on its existence, nature, and impacts makes glacier retreat an area of overlap between the views of the scientific community and the general public. Moreover, in recent years, public institutions have formed to address climate change, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), many national and regional bodies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with sustainable development. Glacier retreat falls clearly within their stated missions. If society cannot address glacier retreat, it is very likely that other aspects of climate change will prove even more intractable. Yet the record on mitigating and adapting to glacier retreat is mixed at best.

Environmental Citizenship in Latin America: Climate, Intermediate Organizations, and Political Subjects

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

Local perceptions in climate change debates: insights from case studies in the Alps and the Andes

The importance of integrating local perspectives into international debates about climate change has received increasing attention. Local perspectives on the impacts of climate change often focus on issues of loss and harm and support the widely recognized need for global responses to climate change as suggested by scientists and international institutions. Here we argue that local perspectives need to be addressed not only from outside communities but also from inside in order to understand people’s responses to climate change: their concerns, their understanding of themselves as members of particular groups and their position in the world, their view on responsibilities for causing climate change, and their perceptions of possible responses. The ethnographic work at two study sites, one in Carhuaz, Cordillera Blanca, Peru, and one in Stilfs, South Tyrolean Alps, Italy, identifies dominant perceptions on climate change at each site with a particular focus on glacier retreat. The case studies show that the view on the need for global action as response to climate change is not necessarily shared throughout the world, and thus presents a challenge to global collaboration.

Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change Around the World

Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of selectivity (the inclusion of some cases and exclusion of others), historicity (the long temporal depth of the pathways to inclusion or exclusion), and consequentiality (the effects of this specificity on claims of responsibility for climate change). These issues are explored through a historical examination of four cases—two (the Arctic, low-lying islands) strongly engaged with climate change frameworks, and two (mountains, deserts) closely associated with other frameworks of sustainable development rather than climate change. For all four regions, the 1960s and 1970s were a key period of initial involvement with environmental issues; the organizations and frameworks that developed at that time shaped the engagement with climate change issues. In turn, the association of climate change with a few remote areas influences climate change institutions and discourses at a global scale.

Who counts, what counts: representation and accountability in water governance in the Upper Comoé sub‐basin, Burkina Faso

This article examines the unfolding of integrated water resource management (IWRM) reforms in southwest Burkina Faso, where water resources are subject to conflicting claims by a diversity of users. We first describe the establishment a local water user committee, showing how choices regarding composition and operations grant varying levels of recognition to different stakeholders. We then discuss the implications for key dimensions of decentralized governance, namely representation and accountability. In particular we focus on: (a) how the interplay of political agendas and policy disconnects shapes the committees viability and credibility and (b) how tensions between techno-scientific and local knowledge affect participation and transparency. We argue that in contexts defined by contentious politics and neo-patrimonial practices, representativeness is better ensured by the direct inclusion of user groups rather than elected officials. Though limited discretionary power, information access, and technical capabilities of committee members inhibit accountability, rural producers uphold their claims through social mobilization and reliance on local knowledge. Recognizing the opportunities offered by the countrys recent democratic turn, we formulate recommendations aimed at addressing structural drivers and enabling citizen agency in decentralized water governance. At the same time, further research is needed on local peoples understandings of representation and accountability, to ensure that they are involved in institutional design and practices in ways that affirm what they value and what they know.

Waiting for Hurricane Irene in New York

In the brief history of Weather, Climate, and Society, the journal’s editorials have addressed a number of topics, including policy issues, methodological concerns, and emerging themes in the literature of the field. To this set I am now adding a topic generated by the weather itself: Hurricane Irene, whose arrival and passage I recently witnessed in New York. This hurricane is relevant for research in weather, climate, and society, particularly in the area of risk perception. One of the most destructive hurricanes to strike the United States in recent years, it will doubtless receive attention from many perspectives and on many scales. I offer my immediate personal observations, which may complement future studies and even help orient such studies, as well.