Surviving & Thriving in a Changing Climate
To survive in a changing climate, especially increasingly extreme climatic variations, it is necessary to not only to mitigate or reduce the causes of climate change, but to reduce its negative impacts on communities by adapting to those changes. In order to truly thrive, however, adaptive resilience is absolutely essential.
The external causes of climate change are primarily anthropogenic in origin, comprising emissions of greenhouse gases and human-sourced aerosols, ozone depletion, and changes in land use (Hegerl et al, 2007). Therefore, humans have the responsibility – that is, the duty as well as the capacity – to cut back on or mitigate our contribution to the ongoing climate crisis.
Mitigation requires “reducing sources of [greenhouse] gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests, and soil)” (NASA, 2022). Examples of mitigatory measures adopted by communities and recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (‘IPCC’) include “staying within a total carbon budget,” expanding the share of renewables in the energy mix, steeply reducing coal and carbon dioxide emissions from industry and electricity generation, converting agricultural lands to forests and for cultivating energy crops, “sustainable intensification of land-use practices, ecosystem restoration and changes toward less resource-intensive diets”, augmenting energy-related investments, and the deployment of various carbon dioxide removal strategies such as “afforestation and reforestation, land restoration and soil carbon sequestration, [bioenergy with carbon capture and storage], direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), enhanced weathering and ocean alkalinization” (Masson-Delmotte et al, 2018).
Adaptive resilience encompasses “social learning by individuals, governance structures, or stakeholders in the aftermath of a triggering event”, thereby boosting the community’s capacity to “respond successfully to, recover from, and adapt to new information or new conditions” (Cutter, 2016). To build an adaptively resilient community, resilience must be regarded as a dynamic process involving capacity-building in the “social, governance, and economic systems” of the community (Cutter, 2016).
According to Ford et al (2020), “the interconnected roles of place, agency, institutions, collective action, Indigenous knowledge, and learning help Indigenous peoples to cope and adapt to environmental change”. In Costa Rica, in light of rising temperatures, coffee farmers have been advised to grow more citrus (Pelling and Garschagen, 2019). Flood evacuation routes in the Dominican Republic “provide safer access to schools and build social cohesion” (Pelling and Garschagen, 2019). In the Mukuru Special Planning Area in Kenya, “138,000 households were planned jointly” by the city council and a group of community-based organisations, providing locals with “information and leadership,” and “community-run microcredit and loan schemes” have been established to “build buffers against poverty and risk” (Pelling and Garschagen, 2019).
“Resilient communities” can be identified by several commonalities.
They are generally led by a strong, committed, innovative, and forward-thinking team, and are able to capitalise on heightened post-crisis “public concern and political will” to “raise standards” and “move as swiftly as possible” (Bullock et al, 2016). These communities successfully integrate climate preparedness and resilience-building into existing plans and planning processes, and to aid public perception, seek to describe climate adaptation measures under more politically neutral branding (Bullock et al, 2016). Their chosen adaptative actions bring both immediate and long-term co-benefits to “the local economy and quality of life”, “while reducing the risk of disasters” (Bullock et al, 2016). In these communities, a broad array of local stakeholders “within multiple jurisdictional levels” participate in planning decisions, thereby facilitating community cooperation and also “[providing] a safety net for vulnerable populations” (Bullock et al, 2016). Finally, “resilient communities” are able to locate sources of funding for programs and activities which strengthen resilience, and prioritising investing upfront in prevention instead of paying more in “disaster aid”, “damages and economic losses,” (Bullock et al, 2016) and the devastating erosion of heritage and culture.
Importantly, adaptive resilience must be driven by equity, that is, all learning, design, and implementation must place “the needs and realities of the least vulnerable” at the forefront (Pelling and Garschagen, 2019).
References:
1. Hegerl, G.C., Zwiers, F. W., Braconnot, P., Gillett, N.P., Luo, Y., Marengo Orsini, J.A., Nicholls, N., Penner, J.E., and Stott, P.A. (2007). ‘Understanding and attributing climate change’ in Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.702–703.
2. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (‘NASA’). ‘Responding to Climate Change’. https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/
3. Masson-Delmotte, V., Zhai, P., Pörtner, H.O., Roberts, D., Skea, J., Shukla, P.R., Pirani, A., Moufouma-Okia, W., Péan, C., Pidcock, R., Connors, S., Matthews, J.B.R., Chen, Y., Zhou, X., Gomis, M.I., Lonnoy, E., Maycock, T., Tignor, M., and Waterfield, T. (eds) (2018). ’Global warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty’. (IPCC, 2018).
4. Cutter, S.L. (2016). ‘Resilience To What? Resilience For Whom?’. The Geographical Journal, 182(2) 2016, 110–113.
5. Ford, J.D., King, N., Galappaththi, E.K., Pearce, T., McDowell, G., and Harper, S.L. (2020). ‘The Resilience of Indigenous Peoples to Environmental Change’. One Earth 2(6) 2020, pp.532–543.
6. Pelling, M., and Garschagen, M. (2019). ‘Put Equity First in Climate Adaptation’. Nature 569(7756) 2019, pp. 327–329.
7. Bullock, J.A., Haddow, G.D., Haddow, K.S., and Coppola, D.P. (2016). 'Living with climate change: how communities are surviving and thriving in a changing climate.’ (Florida: Routledge, 2016).