Vulnerability and Adaptation to
Climate Change
Karen O’Brien
Department of Sociology and Human Geography
University of Oslo
Karen.obrien@sgeo.uio.no
Lecture Outline
1.
Climate Change: A Brief Overview
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2.
Climate Change Vulnerability
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3.
An ”Us and them” approach to climate equity
Winners and losers
Beyond the N-S Divide: Human Security
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6.
Adaptive capacity
Sustainable adaptation
The North-South Divide
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5.
Outcome vs. context
Multiple stressors
Climate Change Adaptation
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4.
Certainties and uncertainties
Growing inequities, growing interconnections
Addressing climate change vs. addressing human security
Time to reframe the issue of climate change?
–
An environmental issue vs. a human security issue
Key points
• First, vulnerability to climate change is influenced by
multiple processes of global change.
• Second, changing economic and social policies
strongly influence the capacity to cope with and adapt
to climate change.
• Third, vulnerabilities are linked through an
increasingly connected global economy and society,
such that actions and behaviors taken in one place
have implications for other places.
• Fourth, vulnerability to climate change is not limited
to developing countries.
1. Climate Change: The Certainties
• Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse
gases are increasing due to human activities
• The climate is changing as a result.
• There are already observed impacts of
climate change.
• The changes that we are seeing over a very
short time scale are unprecedented in human
history.
Warming of the climate system is
unequivocal, as is now evident from
observations of increases in global
average air and ocean temperatures,
widespread melting of snow and ice, and
rising global average sea level
(IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, WGI, SPM, 2007)
Observed and projected
concentration of CO2 in
the atmosphere
960 ppm
550 ppm
CO2 (ppm)
280 ppm
200 ppm
5.8°C
Temperatur (oC)
0°C
• Today: Higher than in the past 650.000 år
• 2100:
-8°C
Highest in millions (~20) of years
1.4°C
The increase is mainly caused by burning of coal, oil and
gas
850,000
650,000
650,000 år
year
1850
2007
2100
Projected global warming
3 ºC: Irreversibe changes
2 ºC: EU target
Requires > 50% cut in
emissions by 2050
IPCC 2007
Projected global warming
Has likely not been warmer
during the past 3 mill years
IPCC 2007
Projected global warming
Has likely not been warmer
during the past 3 mill years
Mitigation
Adaptation
IPCC 2007
Today 2037 ‘57
Source: Helge Drange, Bjerknes Center
1. Climate Change – the uncertainties
• We don’t know about the rate of future
emissions. SRES scenarios have been
developed following different story lines, but
we don’t know which, if any, will be followed.
• We don’t know exactly how climate variability
will be influenced by climate change.
• We don’t know about all of the feedbacks
(biophysical and social) that may accelerate
(or reduce) climate change. There is
uncertainty in how climate change will interact
with other processes of change.
Changing variability and extreme events
Source: Smit and Pilisofova 2003
Sea ice in the Arctic
• Biophysical feedbacks:
– Ice-albedo feedback
– Permafrost-methane feedback
• Social feedbacks
– Northern Sea Route and global shipping
– Oil and gas reserves in the Arctic
2. Climate Change Vulnerability
• For some, vulnerability refers to the likelihood
of injury, death, loss, disruption of livelihoods
or other harms as the result of stressors or
shocks resulting from climate change.
Vulnerability is a measurable outcome of
climate change.
• For others, vulnerability is closely linked to
context in which people experience shocks
and stressors related to any type of change.
Vulnerability is generated by social,
economic, environmental, political,
technological, and cultural conditions.
Vulnerability
• Outcome: Climate change will result in rainfall
decreases that can lead to reduced maize
yields, which can be considered a negative
outcomes for farmers (i.e. farmers are
vulnerable to climate change).
• Contextual: Trade liberalization is changing
the context for agriculture and farming in
Mexico. Farmers are facing both import
competition and climate variability and
change. Their vulnerability to climate change
is influenced by multiple processes.
Source: O’Brien et al. 2007
Multiple processes of change
•
•
•
•
•
•
Globalization
Infectious diseases
Violent conflicts
Urbanization
Technological change
Etc.
Implications
• A small change in climate can have large
consequences – it can push some people
over the edge in terms of what they can cope
with.
• Dangerous climate change means different
things to different people/groups/regions!
3. Climate Change Adaptation
• Many people and societies are not welladapted to climate variability;
• A changing climate means more variability
and uncertainty;
• Regardless of GHG reductions, we can
expect some climate change in the coming
decades.
• Adaptation is a key response to climate
change.
Definition of Adaptation
• Adaptation can be described as adjustments
in practices, processes, or structures to take
into account changing climate conditions, to
moderate potential damages, or to benefit
from opportunities associated with climate
change (McCarthy et al., 2001).
• Adaptation can occur in response to gradual
changes, to changes in variability and
extreme events, or to projected scenarios of
future climate change.
• Adaptations can be spontaneous or planned.
Adaptive Capacity
• A function of wealth, technology,information,
skills, infrastructure, institutions, equity,
empowerment, and the ability to spread risk.
• Unevenly distributed – some will be able to
adapt better than others.
Sustainable Adaptation
• The broader goals of most sustainability
efforts are to foster economic and social
practices that contribute to the maintenance
of environmental quality, diversity of species
and preservation of ecological functions for
the benefit of both humans and other living
things;
• Combining aspects of both sustainability and
adaptation, the notion of sustainable
adaptation entails measures that reduce
vulnerability and promote long-term resilience
in a changing climate.
The relationship between poverty and vulnerability
• Vulnerability to
climate change
can often lead to
poverty
outcomes
• Non-poor can be
vulnerable
• Not all poor are
vulnerable, or
vulnerable in the
same ways
Reducing vulnerability through
adaptation
• Reducing risk and exposure to risk
• Increasing adaptive capacity
• Decreasing underlying causes of vulnerability
Questions to think about:
• Does high adaptive capacity inevitably lead to
adaptation?
• Is one person/group/nation’s adaptation
another’s vulnerability?
• Is migration an adaptation, or a failure to
adapt?
4. The North-South Divide
• Most emissions have been produced by
industrialized countries;
• The most vulnerable to climate change are
often those who have contributed least to it,
and who have little voice in deciding what to
do about it.
• Climate change as an issue of equity, justice
and fairness.
Equity Issues in Mitigation and Adaptation
• Responsibility, compensation, implications for
future development, implications for future
generations.
• “The cardinal climate change inequity is …
not the potentially unfair allocation of
mitigation targets but the inevitably unfair
distribution of climate impact burdens.” (Müller 2002)
A Global Stalemate
• Whose responsibility is it to mitigate climate
change; who should pay for adaptation? If
80% emissions cuts are required by 2060,
then how do we mobilize action?
• How do individuals and communities respond
to change, and is it possible to avoid the ageold tendency to wait until after a disaster has
occurred to respond?
”Us versus them” mentality
• Does the North-South divide perpetuate an
”us vs. them” attitude towards climate
change?
• Does it contribute to Northern complacency?
• Does it contribute to Southern victimization?
-- Reflects one type of power relations (national)
but hides other types (class, gender, age)
Winners and losers
• Who wins from climate change?
• Who loses?
• Are these relative or absolute? Static or
dynamic? At what spatial and temporal
scales?
• Who outcomes inevitable?
• Who decides?
5. Human Security
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•
•
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Freedom from fear, freedom from want (1945);
Safety from chronic threats, protection from disruptions. Seven
dimension of human security: personal, environmental,
economic, political, community, health, and food security (UNDP
1994);
”The objective of human security is to safeguard the vital core of
all human lives from critical pervasive threats, in a way that is
consistent with long-term fulfillment (Human Security
Commission, 2003);
Human Security is achieved when and where individuals and
communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or
adapt to threats to their human, environmental and social rights;
have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and
actively participate in pursuing these options (GECHS 1999).
Human Security
• Puts individuals and communities at the
center of analysis, and focuses on how they
can respond to change;
• Has both internal and external dimensions. It
is as much about psychology and personal
development as it is about economic and
social development;
• It is about what people value and why, and
how these shape priorities and actions.
Two dimensions of human security
• Equity dimension (fairness, justice, ethics)
• Connectivity dimension (economic, social and
political interests)
Human security: The equity dimension
• Recognizes deep social and economic
inequalities;
• Emphasizes the role of context;
• Focuses on structures that create insecurities
based on race, class, caste, gender, age, or
simply place;
• Draws attention to role of agents (power and
politics) in producing or reducing human
security;
• Relational aspects: one individual’s security is
often another’s insecurity.
Human : the connectivity dimension
• Takes a ”big picture” view of human security;
• Sees humans as part of a larger ”global
system”, where processes and outcomes are
linked over space and time.
6. Time to reframe the issue of climate
change?
• How we frame climate change matters!
• The dominant discourse has focused on
climate change as an environmental problem.
• This dictates the questions that are asked,
the research that is done, and the policy
responses that are adopted.
• What if we reframe climate change as an
issue of human security?
Discourses
• a “system of representation made up of rules of
conduct, established texts and institutions which
regulate what meanings can and cannot be
produced.” (Foucault in Smith 1998)
• “an area of language use expressing a particular
standpoint and related to a certain set of institutions.
Concerned with a limited range of objects, a
discourse emphasizes some concepts at the expense
of others.” (Peet and Watts 2001)
• “the process through which social reality inevitably
comes into being.”
(Escobar 1996)
Discourses on Climate Change
• A discourse may speak to someone’s truth,
but ignore or disregard another’s truth.
• Discourses are about power relations; they
are not neutral.
• Whose truth counts?
• Example: Climate change is a pollution
problem vs. Climate change is a social
problem.
Climate change as a human security
issue
• Need to address the underlying factors that
contribute to insecurity;
• Responses to climate change that prioritize
human security – is a normative and ethical
approach needed?
• ”The assumption that the environment is separate
from both humanity and economic systems lies at the
heart of the policy difficulties facing sustainable
development and security thinking. The idea of
environment as an independent variable—something
that is beyond human control and that stresses
human societies in ways that require a policy
response—presents a problem for the environmental
dimension of human security.” (Dalby 2002)
“The world we have made as a result of the
level of thinking we have done thus far
creates problems we cannot solve at the
same level of thinking at which we created
them.” -- Albert Einstein
Change the way that you look at things, and
the things that you look at will change.