Earth Today | Study shows adaptation deficits in global climate change response
Published:Thursday | January 6, 2022 | 12:09 AM
RESEARCH INTO adaptation responses to climate change in and outside of small island developing states has unearth findings that would seem to beg a redoubling of efforts to prepare vulnerable countries for possible impacts.
“Across all regions and sectors, the depth of responses is low, with few exceptions, as they involve minor adjustments to business as usual, rather than transformation, and short-term responses to extreme weather events more than long-term proactive change,” noted the study, titled ‘A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change’ and which relied on adaptations reported in academic literature.
The study was undertaken by a global network of some 126 researchers, including The University of the West Indies’ Dr Donovan Campbell of the Department of Geography and Geology, Mona campus and Dr Aidan Farrell of the Department of Life Sciences, St Augustine campus.
“Alterations in farming practices (for example, irrigation, crop variety and timing) or infrastructural modifications (for example, building elevation) fall into this category. Less commonly reported are high-depth responses, such as the permanent relocation of a village or a large-scale, multistakeholder effort to create a resource governance system,” added the research report, published in the Nature Climate Change journal.
The investigations saw the assessment of 1,682 articles that provide the global stocktake of implemented human adaptation to climate change. Those articles were identified from some 48,816 papers published between 2013 and 2019, and which were screened for inclusion in the study using supervised machine learning methods.
The network of 126 experts then “collaboratively and systematically extract information and evidence from these articles, asking: What climate hazards are driving responses? Who is responding? What types of responses are documented? Is adaptation reducing climate change risk? Are adaptations transformational?”
“Documented adaptations were largely fragmented, local and incremental, with limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk-reduction outcomes,” the researchers said.
IMPORTANCE OF ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Adaptation to climate change has long been championed by, in particular, small island developing states, including those of the Caribbean, who are deemed especially vulnerable to risks, such as sea-level rise and extreme events, including droughts hurricane events. Their vulnerability, due to their geographical location, small size and, in some cases, struggling economies, make adaptation especially important.
However, according to the study, it is not immediately clear the extent to which documented adaptation interventions have helped to address their vulnerability.
“Given that adaptation aims to limit climate risks by reducing vulnerability and exposure to climate hazards, understanding the extent to which responses have contributed to risk reduction is critical to evaluate adaptation effectiveness and inform future action. Yet, the vast majority of the papers we reviewed lacked detailed accounting of how, and to what extent, responses lower climate risk, as the authors often assumed or implied risk reduction,” the study noted.
Some 62 per cent of the papers, the researchers said, “provided implicit or explicit evidence that adaptation activities were reducing the risk or vulnerability, but only 3.4 per cent indicated that the risk-reduction outcomes of adaptation responses were formally assessed after implementation”.
“We conducted a further analysis of this subset of papers that were reported to include a formal assessment of risk reduction, to examine the current state of empirical evidence on risk reduction. Among this subset, 30 papers (1.8 per cent of all academic studies in our database) present primary evidence of risk reduction; for example, improved food security and health outcomes measured through indicators such as increased agricultural yields and caloric intake,” the researchers said.
“These studies applied either quantitative (15 articles) or qualitative (11) methods to assess risk reduction, and a minority (four) used mixed methods. A further nine articles quantitatively assessed the improvements in adaptive capacity, but with no clear evidence of changes in the risk outcomes. The remaining 19 (of 58) papers assumed risk- reduction outcomes based on secondary evidence or theories of change,” they added.