The impacts of climate change are already being felt. Learning how to live with these impacts is a priority for human development. In this context, it is too easy to see adaptation as a narrowly ...defensive task – protecting core assets or functions from the risks of climate change. A more profound engagement, which sees climate change risks as a product and driver of social as well as natural systems, and their interaction, is called for.
Adaptation to Climate Change argues that, without care, adaptive actions can deny the deeper political and cultural roots that call for significant change in social and political relations if human vulnerability to climate change associated risk is to be reduced. This book presents a framework for making sense of the range of choices facing humanity, structured around resilience (stability), transition (incremental social change and the exercising of existing rights) and transformation (new rights claims and changes in political regimes). The resilience-transition-transformation framework is supported by three detailed case study chapters. These also illustrate the diversity of contexts where adaption is unfolding, from organizations to urban governance and the national polity.
This text is the first comprehensive analysis of the social dimensions to climate change adaptation. Clearly written in an engaging style, it provides detailed theoretical and empirical chapters and serves as an invaluable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in climate change, geography and development studies.
Mark Pelling is Reader in Geography at King’s College London and before this at the University of Liverpool and University of Guyana. His research and teaching focus on human vulnerability and adaptation to natural hazards and climate change. He has served as a lead author with the IPCC and as a consultant for UNDP, DFID and UN-HABITAT.
Part 1: Framework and Theory 1. Intellectual and Policy Context 2. Understanding Adaptation Part 2: The Resilience-Transition-Transformation Framework 3. Adaptation as Resilience: Social Learning and Self-Organization 4. Adaptation as Transition: Risk and Governance 5. Adaptation as Transformation: Risk Society, Human Security and the Social Contract Part 3: Living with Climate Change 6. Adaptation Within Organizations 7. Adaptation as Urban Risk Discourse and Governance 8. Adaptation as National Political Response to Disaster Part 4: Adapting with Climate Change 9. Conclusion: Adapting with Climate Change
•We map different narratives of urban resilience in Manila, Nairobi, and Cape Town.•These narratives are associated with diverse forms of knowledge and expertise.•Science methods can empower the most ...vulnerable or reinforce existing inequalities.•The processes of developing resilience strategies are key to ensure their legitimacy.•Recognizing this diversity of narratives can facilitate inclusive resilience policy.
In the context of global environmental change much hope is placed in the ability of resilience thinking to help address environment-related risks. Numerous initiatives aim at incorporating resilience into urban planning practices. The purpose of this paper is to open up a conversation on urban resilience by unpacking how diverse science methods contribute to the production of different narratives of urban resilience mobilizing different experts and forms of evidence. A number of scholars have cautioned against uncritical approaches to resilience and asked what resilience means and for whom, also pointing out the normative dimension of the concept. Building on this emerging scholarship we use insights from science and technology studies (STS) and critical social sciences to look at the knowledge infrastructures and networks of actors involved in the development of resilience strategies. Drawing on fieldwork in Manila, Nairobi, and Cape Town, we map different narratives of urban resilience identifying the ways in which science serves to legitimate or alienate particular perspectives on what should be done. We discuss the multiple roles that science methods have for resilience planning. Whereas urban resilience is often portrayed as consensual, we show that a range of narratives, with diverse socio-material implications, exist at the city level. In this way we unearth the conflict that lies beneath an apparent consensus for resilience policy and outline future research directions for urban sustainability.
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When disaster strikes in cities the effects can be catastrophic compared to other environments. But what factors actually determine the vulnerability or resilience of cities? The Vulnerability of ...Cities fills a vital gap in disaster studies by examining the too-often overlooked impact of disasters on cities, the conditions leading to high losses from urban disasters and why some households and communities withstand disaster more effectively than others.
Mark Pelling takes a fresh look at the literature on disasters and urbanization in light of recent catastrophes. He presents three detailed studies of cities in the global South, drawn from countries with contrasting political and developmental contexts: Bridgetown, Barbados - a liberal democracy; Georgetown, Guyana - a post socialist-state; and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic - an authoritarian state in democratic transition.
This book demonstrates that strengthening local capacity - through appropriate housing, disaster-preparedness, infrastructure and livelihoods - is crucial to improving civic resilience to disasters. Equally important are strong partnerships between local community-based organizations, external non-governmental and governmental organizations, public and private sectors and between city and national government. The author highlights and discusses these best practices for handling urban disasters.
With rapid urbanization across the globe, this book is a must-read for professionals, policy-makers, students and researchers in disaster management, urban development and planning, transport planning, architecture, social studies and earth sciences.
This paper develops a framework based on procedural, methodological and ideological elements of participatory vulnerability and risk assessment tools for placing individual approaches within the wide ...range of work that claims a participatory, local or community orientation. In so doing it draws on relevant experience from other areas of development practice from which the disasters field can learn. Participatory disaster risk assessments are examined for their potential to be empowering, to generate knowledge, to be scaled up, to be a vehicle for negotiating local change and as part of multiple‐methods approaches to disaster risk identification and reduction. The paper is a response to an international workshop on Community Risk Assessment organised by ProVention Consortium and the Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme, University of Cape Town. The workshop brought together practitioners and academics to review the challenges and opportunities for participatory methodologies in the field of disaster risk reduction. In conclusion the contribution made by participatory methodologies to global disaster risk reduction assessment and policy is discussed.
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From Resilience to Transformation Pelling, Mark; Manuel-Navarrete, David
Ecology and society,
06/2011, Volume:
16, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Climate change is but one expression of the internal contradictions of capitalism that include also economic inequality and political alienation. Seen in this way analysis of human responses to ...climate change must engage with social relations of power. We explore the potential for resilience theory to meet this challenge by applying a framework that integrates the adaptive cycle heuristic and structuration theory to place power at the heart of the analysis and question the transformational qualities of social systems facing climate change. This theoretical frame is applied to Mahahual and Playa del Carmen, two rapidly expanding towns on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The resilience lens is successful in highlighting internal contradictions that maintain social relations of rigidity above flexibility in the existing governance regimes and development pathway. This generates a set of reinforcing institutions and actions that support the status quo while simultaneously undermining long-term flexibility, equitable and sustainable development. One outcome is the placing of limits on scope for adaptation and mitigation to climate change which are externalized from everyday life and development planning alike.
Calls from the climate change community and a more widespread concern for human security have reawakened the interest of geographers and others in disaster politics. A legacy of geographical research ...on the political causes and consequences of disaster is reviewed and built on to formulate a framework for the analysis of post-disaster political space. This is constructed around the notion of a contested social contract. The Marmara earthquake, Turkey, is used to illustrate the framework and provide empirical detail on the multiple scales and time phasing of post-disaster political change. Priorities for a future research agenda in disaster politics are proposed.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The burgeoning interest in social capital within the climate change community represents a welcome move towards a concern for the behavioural elements of adaptive action and capacity. In this paper ...the case is put forward for a critical engagement with social capital. There is need for an open debate on the conceptual and analytical traps and opportunities that social capital presents. The paper contrasts three schools of thought on social capital and uses a social capital lens to map out current and future areas for research on adaptation to climate change. It identifies opportunities for using social capital to research adaptive capacity and action within communities of place and communities of practice.
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Ongoing climate change is encouraging cities to reevaluate their risk management strategies. Urban communities increasingly are being forced to respond to climate shifts with actions that promote ...resistance, resilience, or even larger scale transformations. Our objective is to present a conceptual framework that facilitates examination of how the transition from one type of risk management strategy or regime to another takes place. The research framework is built around a set of assumptions regarding the process of transition between risk management regimes. The framework includes five basic conceptual elements: (1) risk management regimes, (2) development pathways, (3) activity spheres, (4) activity spaces, and (5) root, contextual, and proximate drivers. The interaction among these elements and the potential for transition between four different possible regime states including resistance, resilience, transformation, and collapse are presented. The framework facilitates and guides analysis on whether and how transition is emergent, constrained, or accelerated in specific contexts. A case study of post-Hurricane Sandy New York is used to illustrate the framework and its overall effectiveness.
Institutionally configured risk Zaidi, R Zehra; Pelling, Mark
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
05/2015, Volume:
52, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper argues for an increased emphasis on the institutions of risk governance and management in understanding urban resilience. This moves analysis of vulnerability away from a focus on ...individuals to also consider risk management regimes as co-productive of vulnerability and resilience in the City. This is illustrated through the alpplication of an Adaptive Capacity Index to unpack the role played by formal governance institutions in mediating resilience to extreme heat events in the empirical case of London. Analysis shows that the configuration of risk at the institutional level directs heat wave risk management through the health services, and operationalises it during the emergency phase of hazard onset. This misses an important opportunity for integrating individual and regime level risk management initiatives, which we proposed can be worked out through greater collaboration with social services and interaction with those caring for the vulnerable, has yet to be fully integrated into planning and practice in London and elsewhere.
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Climate change is a severe global threat. Research on climate change and vulnerability to natural hazards has made significant progress over the last decades. Most of the research has been devoted to ...improving the quality of climate information and hazard data, including exposure to specific phenomena, such as flooding or sea-level rise. Less attention has been given to the assessment of vulnerability and embedded social, economic and historical conditions that foster vulnerability of societies. A number of global vulnerability assessments based on indicators have been developed over the past years. Yet an essential question remains how to validate those assessments at the global scale. This paper examines different options to validate global vulnerability assessments in terms of their internal and external validity, focusing on two global vulnerability indicator systems used in the WorldRiskIndex and the INFORM index. The paper reviews these global index systems as best practices and at the same time presents new analysis and global results that show linkages between the level of vulnerability and disaster outcomes. Both the review and new analysis support each other and help to communicate the validity and the uncertainty of vulnerability assessments. Next to statistical validation methods, we discuss the importance of the appropriate link between indicators, data and the indicandum. We found that mortality per hazard event from floods, drought and storms is 15 times higher for countries ranked as highly vulnerable compared to those classified as low vulnerable. These findings highlight the different starting points of countries in their move towards climate resilient development. Priority should be given not just to those regions that are likely to face more severe climate hazards in the future but also to those confronted with high vulnerability already.
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•Internal and external validation is crucial for global vulnerability assessments.•Vulnerability of WRI and INFORM index partially explains mortality and economic losses.•Hazard mortality is 15 times higher in most compared to least vulnerable countries.•Vulnerability shows different starting points towards climate resilient development.
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