Earth Today | ‘Transformative adaptation a must’
Researchers bat for shift in climate-readiness interventions
Published:Thursday | January 13, 2022 | 12:07 AM
A RECENTLY published study has suggested that adaptation will need to become more transformative as the risks associated with a changing climate become more severe.
Adaptation, which has for years been championed by small island developing states and other vulnerable countries, is about ecological, social or economic adjustments made in response to actual or expected climatic changes and impacts, such as increased temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather events.
As for what transformative adaptation looks like, the researchers who worked on the study, ‘A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change’, said it is adaptation that has depth, speed and scope.
“Depth describes the novelty of an action, scope the geographical or sectoral breadth and speed the time taken to implement,” explained the network of 126 investigators, 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.
“We (also) added a fourth component that asked to what extent adaptation actions approach or overcome the limits known to constrain adaptation,” they added.
The shift to a more transformative approach, they noted further, means that adaptation responses are moving beyond “business as usual or incremental changes to activities that change the fundamental attributes of socio-ecological systems”.
Their investigations involved the assessment of 1,682 articles that provided 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.
What they found, among other things, was low levels of transformative adaptation.
“The overall transformative potential of adaptations documented in the academic literature across most global regions and sectors is low. Some adaptations exhibit a high depth, scope and speed, and challenge limits, but these are uncommon,” they said.
“In fact, the results suggest there may be trade-offs between the scope of responses on the one hand and the speed of implementation on the other, perhaps due to the long timelines involved in coordinating or executing large-scale measures,” the researchers added.
They found, too, what they described as “concerning gaps”, including “a relative scarcity of reported transformative adaptations in cases for which the current and projected risks are high, and a lack of evidence that well-documented limits to adaptation are being challenged or overcome”.
“These knowledge gaps reflect the substantial and recognised difficulties involved in measuring the actual (when responding to observed risks) and potential (when responding to projected risks) effectiveness of a wide range of adaptation responses,” the researchers said.
“The absence of evidence of risk reduction in the academic literature that documents implemented adaptation actions does not necessarily imply that no risk reduction is taking place. Adaptation actions are documented beyond the academic literature as well (for example, in the grey literature). It is possible that there is more evidence of risk reduction in these other literatures, so to evaluate that literature is an important next step for global adaptation stocktaking,” they added.