Abstract
The scale and the patterns of the recent wildfires in Australia, the highest tides in the past fifty years experienced in the city of Venice in Italy, and the recent flooding in Bangladesh, which killed more than sixty and displaced thousands of people, have been unprecedented. These patterns of weather and climate anomalies have become increasingly common. In sum, people all over the world have been increasingly exposed to various natural hazards. Some might wonder whether the science of adaptation has reached its threshold.
The economic, environmental, social, and cultural burdens of climate change are enormous and unbearable for a large number of the world’s population, particularly for those who are in the Global South and who have limited resources. Thus, adaptation and resilience have become increasingly important. So far scholars and practitioners in different parts of the world have used various empirical methods and techniques to research adaptation. Results suggest that adaptation is largely place-based and influenced by local economic, political, social, and cultural determinants. However, there is no agreement on frameworks, methods, metrics, and indicators designed for an assessment of progress toward the global goal on adaptation, a major policy issue.
Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change, edited by Zinta Zommers and Keith Alverson, is a significant contribution to understand the adaptation process and its outcomes at the global scale. Leading adaptation and resilience scholars and practitioners contributed twenty-seven chapters, using various disciplinary lenses based on several geographical contexts and adaptation challenges. Contributors discuss a range of weather and climatic stresses, such as sea level rise, salinity intrusions, droughts, unpredictable rainfall patterns, and flooding, as well as place-based responses. These stresses have not only implications on local and individual livelihoods but also global sustainability and development.
The book is divided into an introduction, authored by Keith Alverson and Zinta Zommers, and five different sections. The first section, which consists of Chapters 1 to 5, focuses on the societal needs for adaptation. For example, in Chapter 2, Robert Nicholls discusses the household level adaptation to sea level rise, which has been one of the major environmental threats to low-lying coastal areas over the past few decades. These areas often house large populations, have high economic activity, and are important from a national security perspective. Considering the complexity of coastal adaptation, Nicholls highlights that adaptation to coastal problems is a multistage process. He argues that planning, evaluation. monitoring, and information and awareness building should be within multiple layers of policy and decision-making. He also stresses the importance of multidisciplinarity and multi-party collaborations at multiple levels.
In Chapter 5, Saleemul Huq, Yousuf Mahid, and Nadine Suliman discuss resilience and explain how it is used in various climate policy dialogues. Their chapter shows that even though people tend to refer to resilience in the global discourse around climate change, more specific climate policy dialogues prefer to use the term “adaptation.” The contributors also use the example of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which does not use the term “resilience,” since the UN considers resilience as an undefined term, and instead refers to adaptation, which has a narrower connotation. The contributors also discuss the differences between incremental and transformational adaptation, which are increasingly important in society and the state’s response to climate change.
The second section, which covers Chapters 6 to 14, details some of the specific adaptation challenges related to hazards, sectors, and ecosystems. For example, Chapter 7, authored by Ethan D. Coffel, Alex de Sherbinin, Radley M. Horton, Kathryn Lane, Stefan Kienberger, and Olga Wilhelmi, is about the science behind the adaptation to extreme heat. Because of global warming, many countries have faced unprecedented summer heat, which affects human lives, nature, and the economy. The contributors argue that social isolation could be a major risk factor of heat-related illnesses. Heat and drought are two closely intertwined aspects which have an impact on the physical and the social environment as well.
In Chapter 10, Gillisann Harootunian highlights the importance of structural changes at all levels to ensure meaningful adaptation. She uses California’s drought, drinking water, and dryland issues to explain the need for structural changes for meaningful adaptation outcomes. She argues that the current business-as-usual practice might need a paradigmatic shift to make societies more resilient.
In Chapter 12, Julie Greenwalt, Nina Raasakka, and Keith Alverson emphasize some major changes to achieve resilient development pathways. In their view, people and policy makers need to focus on sustaining national wealth, including economic, environmental, and social capital assets, rather than concentrating on development focused on the economy. Considering non-economic factors in the development discourse is not new. For example, Bhutan, a small South Asian country, uses the Gross Happiness Index to measure their quality of life and well-being. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) uses the Human Development Index (HDI) in many parts of the world that focuses on people and their capabilities by using a composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, in addition to economic growth. Julie Greenwalt and colleagues suggest that policies should be aligned with the local, regional, and national scale for effective and inclusive development, where the diversity of goals are reflected without excluding different communities.
In Chapter 13, Alvin Chandra and Karen McNamara discuss the similarities and differences between the key characteristics of climate-smart agriculture in the Philippines and Timor-Leste. The contributors report that the interventions of smallholder farmers are climate-smart when they can directly address their climatic exposures; support a combination of adaptation, food security, livelihood strategies; and can empower marginalized people at risk. Chandra and McNamara also confirm that multi-actor partnerships with local grass root level organizations are critical for maximizing the effectiveness of climate-smart agriculture. This chapter effectively stresses the importance of collaborations, partnerships, and exchange in the process of knowledge production, planning, and implementation.
The third section, which focuses on various adaptation toolkits and strategies, consists of Chapters 15 to 22. Most of these chapters discuss adaptation and resilience needs, and the achieved progress. For example, in Chapter 18, John Furlow, James Buizer, Simon Mason, and Glenroy Brown discuss the use of climate services, which involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of weather and climate information among drought-affected farmers in Jamaica. They argue that climate information services must be demand-driven and should be based on a baseline assessment of local needs, constraints, and a locally relevant information dissemination mechanism. They also found that the provision of information via trusted intermediaries is as important as the information itself.
The fourth and final section, with Chapters 23 to 27, addresses some recent dimensions of adaptation and issues that have potential future implications. For example, in Chapter 23, Sarah Henly-Shepard, Zinta Zommers, Eliot Levine, and Daniel Abrahams discuss that climate-resilient development has the potential to bridge humanitarian aid and development in a fragile contest by helping to anticipate, prevent, mitigate, and reduce complex crises. This entire process can positively transform systems although there is a tendency that scholars are sometimes more focused on epistemological debates.
In sum, the chapters in this book apply various scientific methods, use precautionary principles, and highlight the importance of experiential learning. Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change is a successful attempt to bridge the gaps between science, society, and policy and to effectively contribute to the process of epistemological development. Even though this book is largely about the science of adaptation, the editors explicitly mention that effective adaptation also contains aspects of arts. The chapters in this book demonstrate the cultural, social, psychological, and ethnographic nuances that must be taken into adaptation considerations for building a resilient society. Despite its strengths, this book does not sufficiently discuss aspects of climate justice and equitable resilience. Many people at the margins are often the major victims of disproportionate amount of climate vulnerability. Thus, climate justice and equitable resilience should be at the core of climate adaptation and development discourse.
Overall, this book is an outstanding contribution to the body of knowledge on adaptation and resilience planning. Students, scholars, policy makers, and practitioners whose work intersects with climate and society will receive tremendous insights from the case studies discussed in this book. Some readers may be able to relate their own location-specific climate crisis to these chapters. This book is a true demonstration of multidisciplinarity, evidence of existing climate knowledge, and an aspiration of expanding the frontiers of human understanding on climate change adaptation.