Susanne C. Moser

A framework to diagnose barriers to climate change adaptation.

This article presents a systematic framework to identify barriers that may impede the process of adaptation to climate change. The framework targets the process of planned adaptation and focuses on potentially challenging but malleable barriers. Three key sets of components create the architecture for the framework. First, a staged depiction of an idealized, rational approach to adaptation decision-making makes up the process component. Second, a set of interconnected structural elements includes the actors, the larger context in which they function (e.g., governance), and the object on which they act (the system of concern that is exposed to climate change). At each of these stages, we ask (i) what could impede the adaptation process and (ii) how do the actors, context, and system of concern contribute to the barrier. To facilitate the identification of barriers, we provide a series of diagnostic questions. Third, the framework is completed by a simple matrix to help locate points of intervention to overcome a given barrier. It provides a systematic starting point for answering critical questions about how to support climate change adaptation at all levels of decision-making.

Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change

1 p. abstract. Print (xxv, 549 p.) available for circulation at the University of Oregons John E. Jaqua Law Library under the call number: QC981.8.C5 C767 2007. For more information, visit the publishers web site at: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521869234#contributors

ASSESSING THE VULNERABILITY OF COASTAL COMMUNITIES TO EXTREME STORMS: THE CASE OF REVERE, MA., USA

Climate change may affect the frequency, intensity, and geographic distribution of severe coastal storms. Concurrent sea-level rise would raise the baseline of flooding during such events. Meanwhile, social vulnerability factors such as poverty and disability hinder the ability to cope with storms and storm damage. While physical changes are likely to remain scientifically uncertain into the foreseeable future, the ability to mitigate potential impacts from coastal flooding may be fostered by better understanding the interplay of social and physical factors that produce human vulnerability. This study does so by integrating the classic causal model of hazards with social, environmental, and spatial dynamics that lead to the differential ability of people to cope with hazards. It uses Census data, factor analysis, data envelopment analysis, and floodplain maps to understand the compound social and physical vulnerability of coastal residents in the city of Revere, MA, USA.

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).

Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Climate Change: New Dimensions in Disaster Risk, Exposure, Vulnerability, and Resilience

Executive Summary Disaster signifies extreme impacts suffered when hazardous physical events interact with vulnerable social conditions to severely alter the normal functioning of a community or a society (high confidence) . Social vulnerability and exposure are key determinants of disaster risk and help explain why non-extreme physical events and chronic hazards can also lead to extreme impacts and disasters, while some extreme events do not. Extreme impacts on human, ecological, or physical systems derive from individual extreme or non-extreme events, or a compounding of events or their impacts (for example, drought creating the conditions for wildfire, followed by heavy rain leading to landslides and soil erosion). [1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.3, 1.2.3.1, 1.3] Management strategies based on the reduction of everyday or chronic risk factors and on the reduction of risk associated with non-extreme events, as opposed to strategies based solely on the exceptional or extreme, provide a mechanism that facilitates the reduction of disaster risk and the preparation for and response to extremes and disasters (high confidence) . Effective adaptation to climate change requires an understanding of the diverse ways in which social processes and development pathways shape disaster risk. Disaster risk is often causally related to ongoing, chronic, or persistent environmental, economic, or social risk factors. [1.1.2.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4.1, 1.3.2] Development practice, policy, and outcomes are critical to shaping disaster risk (high confidence) . Disaster risk may be increased by shortcomings in development. Reductions in the rate of depletion of ecosystem services, improvements in urban land use and territorial organization processes, the strengthening of rural livelihoods, and general and specific advances in urban and rural governance advance the composite agenda of poverty reduction, disaster risk reduction, and adaptation to climate change. [1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.2, 1.1.3, 1.3.2, 1.3.3]

Managing for Multiple Resources Under Climate Change: National Forests

This study explores potential adaptation approaches in planning and management that the United States Forest Service might adopt to help achieve its goals and objectives in the face of climate change. Availability of information, vulnerability of ecological and socio-economic systems, and uncertainties associated with climate change, as well as the interacting non-climatic changes, influence selection of the adaptation approach. Resource assessments are opportunities to develop strategic information that could be used to identify and link adaptation strategies across planning levels. Within a National Forest, planning must incorporate the opportunity to identify vulnerabilities to climate change as well as incorporate approaches that allow management adjustments as the effects of climate change become apparent. The nature of environmental variability, the inevitability of novelty and surprise, and the range of management objectives and situations across the National Forest System implies that no single approach will fit all situations. A toolbox of management options would include practices focused on forestalling climate change effects by building resistance and resilience into current ecosystems, and on managing for change by enabling plants, animals, and ecosystems to adapt to climate change. Better and more widespread implementation of already known practices that reduce the impact of existing stressors represents an important “no regrets” strategy. These management opportunities will require agency consideration of its adaptive capacity, and ways to overcome potential barriers to these adaptation options.

Responding to Climate Change: Governance and Social Action beyond Kyoto

It has become an accepted wisdom within academic circles and policy discourse that climate change is a global problem in need of global solutions. More than a decade after the formation of the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol was ratiaed by a sufacient number of states to come into effect in February 2005. Strenuous international negotiations have led to the development of important structures and processes to govern reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Many, however, consider the progress made as grindingly slow and, in the light of scientiac evidence about the rate of change in the global atmosphere and recommendations for the need to reduce emissions by at least 60 percent over the next afty years, inadequate. In the absence of more effective international action, and cognizant of the big task ahead, alternative attempts at climate change governance and social action have emerged. These approaches recognize that international agreements—if implemented—provide only a partial means through which the mitigation of climate change can be directed, and in turn are reliant on actions in a variety of arenas and at different scales to be effectively implemented. They also increasingly recognize the need to respond to and plan for the impacts of climate change, thus opening up new arenas and linkages between science and policy. This special issue of Global Environmental Politics seeks to move beyond the framework of the international political processes within which the climate change issue is frequently discussed to illuminate how climate protection is sought across a myriad of different sites. In seeking to understand responses to climate change, we are interested in “the processes that create the conditions for ordered rule and collective action within the political realm”1—that is those processes which take place within formalized arenas of government/governance

Adaptation, mitigation, and their disharmonious discontents: an essay

The frequently heard call to harmonize adaptation and mitigation policies is well intended and many opportunities exist to realize co-benefits by designing and implementing both in mutually supportive ways. But critical tradeoffs (inadequate conditions, competition among means for implementation, and negative consequences of pursuing both simultaneously) also exist, along with policy disconnects that are shaped by history, sequencing, scale, contextual variables, and controversial climate discourses in the public. To ignore these issues can be expected to undermine a more comprehensive, better integrated climate risk management portfolio. The paper discusses various implications of these tradeoffs between adaptation and mitigation for science and policy.

Talk of the city: engaging urbanites on climate change

Climate change requires societal engagement on both mitigation and adaptation. With a growing majority of people living in cities, urban dwellers and municipal decision-makers will need to reduce their emissions and other impacts on the regional and global climate while dealing with the unavoidable near-term and potential longer-term impacts of climate change. To facilitate effective societal response to climate change, a busy, distracted, and so far only marginally interested public needs to be engaged on the topic. This poses significant challenges to communication and sustained outreach efforts. This letter draws on critical insights from a three-year multi-disciplinary project that involved academics and practitioners from various disciplines and sectors of (mostly US) society and explored how to communicate climate change in ways that facilitate societal response. The letter raises questions about key audiences, appropriate messengers, framings and messages, reception of climate change information, and the choice of communication mediums and formats to achieve different communication and engagement goals.

In the Long Shadows of Inaction: The Quiet Building of a Climate Protection Movement in the United States

Many observers perceive the US as an obstructionist force in global efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions. Federal leadershipdespite rhetoricremains absent even as the scientific consensus about the urgency of climate change and public acceptance of the reality of the problem are growing. This situation has created fertile ground for bottom-up political mobilization and action to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Using an actor-centered model of social movement evolution, this paper surveys the signs in civic society, the private sector, and at local and state government levels for the emergence of a climate protection movement in the United States. Diverse initiatives are networked and expanding, thus creating pressure for more federal action. This paper paints a more optimistic and realistic picture of actual efforts in climate protection in the United States, the immensity of the challenges remaining notwithstanding.