Successful Adaptation to Climate Change

This major initiative is a collaboration between nearly 40 thinkers on linking science and policy in a rapidly changing world. It provides the necessary background in adaptation science so that policymakers can draw on the best data available. The key factors cited are communication and public engagement, deliberate planning and decision-making, improved fit with other policy goals, justification of adaptation expenditures, accountability and support for learning and adaptive management. The book as a whole takes anthropogenic climate change as a given, based on the IPCC assessments, which may be controversial for some readers. However, some proposed adaptations are clearly better than others and there are discussions of specific maladaptations to such issues as water stress and conservation. Examples are given from around the world. There is a particularly interesting chart about the adaptation action cycle with key points of feedback and decision-making. The very last chapter brings these macro issues onto a personal level by addressing adaptation from the inside out. The previous chapter makes it clear that people are overwhelmed by the potential scale of the challenge but realise that both individual and collective mobilisation and action are required. Readers will be familiar with the call for a new worldview – here the implications are spelt out in more detail as the way we understand the world friends the space in which we operate and structures our responses according to of our assumptions and beliefs. Karen O'Brien is less optimistic about changing others, and therefore calls for working on ourselves both individually and collectively. Ultimately, what Buckminster Fuller called a world that works for everyone would represent successful adaptation, but there are many steps for us to go through.