Maria Carmen Lemos

Hell and High Water: Practice-Relevant Adaptation Science

Adaptation requires science that analyzes decisions, identifies vulnerabilities, improves foresight, and develops options. Informing the extensive preparations needed to manage climate risks, avoid damages, and realize emerging opportunities is a grand challenge for climate change science. U.S. President Obama underscored the need for this research when he made climate preparedness a pillar of his climate policy. Adaptation improves preparedness and is one of two broad and increasingly important strategies (along with mitigation) for climate risk management. Adaptation is required in virtually all sectors of the economy and regions of the globe, for both built and natural systems (1).

Integrated and Adaptive Management of Water Resources: Tensions, Legacies, and the Next Best Thing

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) and adaptive management (AM) are two institutional and management paradigms designed to address shortcomings within water systems governance; the limits of hierarchical water institutional arrangements in the case of IWRM and the challenge of making water management decisions under uncertainty in the case of AM. Recently, there has been a trend to merge these paradigms to address the growing complexity of stressors shaping water management such as globalization and climate change. However, because many of these joint approaches have received little empirical attention, questions remain about how they might work, or not, in practice. Here, we explore a few of these issues using empirical research carried out in Brazil. We focus on highlighting the potentially negative interactions, tensions, and trade-offs between different institutions/ mechanisms perceived as desirable as research and practice attempt to make water systems management simultaneously integrated and adaptive. Our examples pertain mainly to the use of techno-scientific knowledge in water management and governance in Brazils IWRM model and how it relates to participation, democracy, deliberation, diversity, and adaptability. We show that a legacy of technical and hierarchical management has shaped the integration of management, and subsequently, the degree to which management might also be adaptive. Although integrated systems may be more legitimate and accountable than top-down command and control ones, the mechanisms of IWRM may be at odds with the flexible, experimental, and self-organizing nature of AM.

A Greener Revolution in the Making?: Environmental Governance in the 21st Century

(2007). A Greener Revolution in the Making?: Environmental Governance in the 21st Century. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 49, No. 5, pp. 36-45.

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.

Managing Waters of the Paraíba do Sul River Basin, Brazil: a Case Study in Institutional Change and Social Learning

This article examines the implementation of integrated water-management institutions in the Paraiba do Sul River basin in southeast Brazil. It argues that social learning has been critical in facilitating reform implementation so far, and will likely continue to be an important factor for the future sustainability of the new management system. There has been a synergistic relationship between social learning and Brazils water-reform hybrid governance institutions, in which social learning facilitated the implementation of the reforms new institutions, which in turn enabled further learning in the context of the river basin committees decision-making process. Through interviews, surveys, and observations, we identified social-learning capacities, including trust, an ability to work together, and the committees shared understanding of the institutions problems, possibilities, and mission. Effective management through social learning was demonstrated by the institutions adaptive capacity in the face of a severe drought.

Moving Climate Information off the Shelf: Boundary Chains and the Role of RISAs as Adaptive Organizations

While research focusing on how boundary organizations influence the use of climate information has expanded substantially in the past few decades, there has been relatively less attention to how these organizations innovate and adapt to different environments and users. This paper investigates how one boundary organization,theGreatLakesIntegratedSciencesandAssessmentsCenter(GLISA),hasadaptedbycreating ‘‘boundary chains’’ to diversify its client base while minimizing transaction costs, increasing scientific knowledge usability, and better meeting client climate information needs. In this approach, boundary organizations connect like links in a chain and together these links span the range between the production of knowledge and its use. Three main chain configurations are identified. In the key chain approach, GLISA has partneredwithotherorganizationsinanumberofseparateprojectssimultaneously,diversifyingitsclientbase without sacrificing customization. In the linked chain approach, GLISA is one of several linked boundary organizations that successively deepen the level of customization to meet particular users’ needs. Finally, by partnering with multiple organizations and stakeholder groups in both configurations, GLISA may be laying the groundwork for enhancing their partners’ own capacity to make climate-related decisions through a networked chain approach that facilitates cooperation among organizations and groups. Each of these approaches represents an adaptive strategy that both enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of participating boundary organizations’ work and improves the provision of climate information that meets users’ needs.

Equity in forecasting climate: Can science save the world's poor?

For the past ten years, the role of seasonal climate forecasting (SCF) in decreasing the vulnerability of poor populations in many countries to climate variability and change has been discussed in the scholarly literature and policy circles. This paper reviews the literature on climate forecasting information and explores three main equity implications of SCF use. First, while investment in SCF as a decision-support tool has been justified in social terms, many examples of application show that the most vulnerable are unable to benefit from SCF information and may be harmed by it. Second, the usability of SCF as a decision-making tool has been constrained by accessibility and communication issues. Third, there may be opportunity costs in the sense that focus on SCF displaces political, human and financial capital from other more effective alternatives for decreasing the vulnerability to disaster among the poor. This review argues that, without attention to specific mechanisms to counter pre-existing inequities, the distribution and use of SCF is not likely to ameliorate the conditions of those most in need. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Building Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change in Less Developed Countries

This paper focuses on the relevance of adaptive capacity in the context of the increasing certainty that climate change impacts will affect human populations and different social groups substantially and differentially. Developing and building adaptive capacity requires a combination of interventions that address not only climate-related risks (specific capacities) but also the structural deficits (lack of income, education, health, political power, etc.—generic capacities) that shape vulnerability. We argue that bolstering both generic and specific adaptive capacities, with careful attention to minimizing the potential tensions between these two types of capacities, can help vulnerable groups maintain their ability to address risks in the long run at the same time as they respond effectively to short term climate impacts. We examine the relationship between generic and specific capacities, taking into consideration that they are not always positively related. We then propose a conceptual model describing positive and negative feedbacks between the two.

Sustainable Control of Water-Related Infectious Diseases: A Review and Proposal for Interdisciplinary Health-Based Systems Research

Objective Even when initially successful, many interventions aimed at reducing the toll of water-related infectious disease have not been sustainable over longer periods of time. Here we review historical practices in water-related infectious disease research and propose an interdisciplinary public health oriented systems approach to research and intervention design. Data sources On the basis of the literature and the authors’ experiences, we summarize contributions from key disciplines and identify common problems and trends. Practices in developing countries, where the disease burden is the most severe, are emphasized. Data extraction We define waterborne and water-associated vectorborne diseases and identify disciplinary themes and conceptual needs by drawing from ecologic, anthropologic, engineering, political/economic, and public health fields. A case study examines one of the classes of water-related infectious disease. Data synthesis The limited success in designing sustainable interventions is attributable to factors that include the complexity and interactions among the social, ecologic, engineering, political/economic, and public health domains; incomplete data; a lack of relevant indicators; and most important, an inadequate understanding of the proximal and distal factors that cause water-related infectious disease. Fundamental change is needed for research on water-related infectious diseases, and we advocate a systems approach framework using an ongoing evidence-based health outcomes focus with an extended time horizon. The examples and case study in the review show many opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations, data fusion techniques, and other advances. Conclusions The proposed framework will facilitate research by addressing the complexity and divergent scales of problems and by engaging scientists in the disciplines needed to tackle these difficult problems. Such research can enhance the prevention and control of water-related infectious diseases in a manner that is sustainable and focused on public health outcomes.

The politics of pollution control in Brazil: State actors and social movements cleaning up Cubatao

Abstract This study of environmental policy making in Brazil focuses on a successful program to control air, water, and soil pollution in Cubatao, which previously had been widely known as one of the most polluted cities in the world. It examines the role played by a temporary alliance between state technocrats and popular movements formed to push the local polluting industries to comply with environmental legislation. It concludes that, during Brazils democratic transition, it was possible for state and social groups to avoid traditional patterns of cooptation and confrontation in policy making.