Chapter 17: Decision-Making Options for Managing Risk
Executive Summary
Introduction and Framing
Successful adaptation and maladaptation form the opposite poles of a continuum (medium confidence). The evaluation of an adaptation option and its location on this continuum are context specific and vary across time, place and evaluation perspectives (high confidence). Despite knowledge gaps, adaptation options can be assessed according to several criteria, such as benefits to humans, benefits to ecosystem services, benefits to equity (marginalised ethnic groups, gender, low-income populations), transformational potential and contribution to greenhouse gas emission reduction (medium confidence). These factors can aid evaluation of co-benefits and tradeoffs within and between adaptation responses (high confidence) facilitating successful adaptation and reducing the likelihood of maladaptation (medium confidence) {17.5.1, 17.5.2}.
Adaptation options across a range of climate risk settings (Representative Key Risks) have potential for some degree of maladaptation alongside varied potential for success (very high confidence). Maladaptation can result from unaccounted tradeoffs with low-income groups and the transformational potential of adaptation (medium confidence). Success is greatest when adaptation enhances gender equity (medium confidence) and supports ecosystem function and services (medium confidence). Among adaptation options, coastal infrastructure is an example that has particularly high risk for maladaptation through trade-offs for natural system functioning and human vulnerability over time. Examples of options with high potential for successful adaptation are nature restoration (medium confidence), social safety nets (medium confidence) and adaptations relating to changes of diets and reducing food waste (medium confidence) {17.5.2}.
17.2 Risk Management and Adaptation Options
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17.2.2 Combining Adaptation Options: Portfolios of Risk Management and Risk Governance
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Box 17.2 | Climate Risk Management in Conflict-Affected Areas
Consequences of conflict that exacerbate vulnerability to climate change include: displacement, loss of access to employment leading to illegal livelihoods, gender-based violence, lack of land tenure, low literacy, poor access to social and health services, destruction, looting and theft of key assets, such as houses, food stocks and livestock, among others (Jaspars and Maxwell, 2009; Chandra et al., 2017; Anguita Olmedo and González Gómez del Miño, 2019). Such impacts perpetuate cycles of poverty (World Bank, 2013), making conflictaffected populations more susceptible to suffer from climate-related events (Basher, 2006; Coughlan de Perez et al., 2019). For example, in Mindanao, Philippines, poverty is closely linked to long-standing armed conflicts; both climate change and conflict have significantly increased smallholder vulnerability, resulting in loss of livelihoods, financial assets, agricultural yield and the worsening of debt problems (Chandra et al., 2017). In Colombia, displacement induced by conflict has pushed the population to live in high-risk areas such as steep slopes susceptible to landslides and river banks exposed to flooding (Albuja and Adarve, 2011). This conflict-induced vulnerability, with little adaptation activity, has in turn resulted in climate-related disasters (Kuipers, 2019; Siddiqi et al., 2019).
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17.2.2.5 Incremental and Transformational Adaptation for Managing Risk in the Context of Adaptation Limits
Figure 17.6 | Understanding the spectrum of incremental to transformational planned adaptation for managing climate related heat risk to health including associated soft and hard adaptation limits (Representative Key Risk-E (RKR-E)). Evidence from regional and thematic chapters. The figure from the WGI Atlas shows the change in extreme hot days (above 35°C) across regions for a medium-term scenario and medium global warming relative to 1850–1900. See Table SM17.19.
Please refer to page 2573 to see Figure 17.6.
17.4 Enabling and Catalysing Conditions for Adaptation and Risk Management
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17.4.4 Enabling Condition 3: Knowledge and Capacity
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17.4.4.1 Overview of Knowledge Systems
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Cross-Chapter Box FINANCE: Finance for Adaptation and Resilience
Critiques of the public climate finance architecture are aimed at the overlapping mandates of the institutions programming climate finance, particularly the multi-lateral climate funds, and the challenges in accessing funding (Nakhooda et al., 2014; Amerasinghe et al., 2017; Pickering et al., 2017). However, Pickering et al. (2017) further note that institutional fragmentation of climate finance could result in more flexibility, resilience and innovation. There have also been important governance changes leveraged by some of these funds and instruments, such as integration of gender considerations into projects (Schalatek, 2020).
Many adaptation interventions in the most vulnerable countries, communities and people provide no adequate financial return on investments and can therefore can only be funded with highly concessional public finance. Grant support is most appropriate for measures such as capacity building, planning, public policy and regulatory reforms, disaster risk management and response, community engagement or support for social safety nets, and for addressing social vulnerabilities, including poverty or gender inequality, which constrain adaptation (Grasso, 2010a; Pillay et al., 2017; Agrawal et al., 2019; Buchner et al., 2019).
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17.4.5.4.1 Social movements and other mobilisations
Recent studies of climate-related social movements show that they can act as catalysing agents which promote action to manage climate-related risks (medium confidence). However, these studies use varying definitions of climate movements within the broader context of environmental movements. A prominent topic of research is the rapidity and the large scale of the proliferation of these movements around the world, primarily in urban settings but also in rural and Indigenous contexts (Claeys and Delgado Pugley, 2017).
These movements usually focus on climate mitigation but sometimes include adaptation. Their social bases include groups which had not previously been active in climate politics, notably children and youth, as well as sectors with long traditions of environmental activism, such as women and Indigenous Peoples (see Cross-Chapter Boxes GENDER and INDIG in Chapter 18). Much of the literature on youth movements traces the emergence of the movements themselves (Sanson et al., 2019; Treichel, 2020), their framings of climate change as a social justice issue (Holmberg and Alvinius, 2019) and their presence in demonstrations and on social media (Boulianne et al., 2020). Climate action catalysed by youth and other climate movements include visible international events such as the signing of Declaration on Children, Youth, and Climate Action at COP25 in Madrid 2019 (Han and Ahn, 2020), as well as national efforts, including lawsuits, and local events such as in tree-planting and waste reduction initiatives (Bandura and Cherry, 2019).
17.5 Adaptation Success and Maladaptation, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
17.5.1 Adaptation Success and Maladaptation
17.5.1.1 The Adaptation–Maladaptation Continuum
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17.5.1.1.1 Defining and assessing success in adaptation vis a vis maladaptation
Along the adaptation–maladaptation continuum, adaptation options can score high or low on different outcome criteria identified in this section such as: benefits to the number of people, benefits to ecosystem services, equity outcomes (for marginalised ethnic groups, gender, lowincome populations), transformational potential and contribution to GHG emission reduction (see SM 17.1 for full descriptions). Importantly, the outcome of the assessment, and consequently location of a given adaptation option along this continuum, is dynamic, depending on multiple components, including changes in the characteristics of climate hazards and the effects of iterative risk management. Unfortunately, this temporal dimension is understudied in the literature (including studying thresholds or speed), preventing advances on this specific point.
17.5.1.1.2 Empirical evidence on success of adaptation vis a vis maladaptation
According to an assessment (Figure 17.11; see SM 17.1 for full descriptions) of maladaptation-relevant outcome dimensions, here called criteria, that is, benefits to people, benefits to ecosystem services, benefits to equity (marginalised ethnic groups, gender, low-income populations), transformational potential and contribution to GHG emission reduction, no option is located at one or the other end of the adaptation-maladaptation continuum (Figure 17.11, right panel), showing that all options have some maladaptation potential, that is, trade-offs (very high confidence). This is also shown by the wide confidence ranges of most options (right panel) signifying that most adaptation can be done in a way that involves a higher or a lower risk of maladaptation (medium confidence; see also Figure 17.3). The option of ‘coastal infrastructure’ signifies the highest risk for maladaptation. While it can be an efficient adaptation option in highly densely populated areas (Oppenheimer et al., 2019; CCP2.3), it has potential trade-offs for natural system functioning and human vulnerability over time. The options most widely associated with successful adaptation are ‘nature restoration’, ‘social safety nets’, ‘change of farm/fishery practice’ and ‘change of diets/reducing food waste’ (high confidence).
Some options show the dominant influence of certain criteria (Figure 17.11, central panel rows). For example, ‘availability of health infrastructure’ and ‘access to health care’ are dominated by the criterion ‘greenhouse gas emissions’. Similarly, ‘spatial planning’ carries a high risk of disadvantages to marginalised ethnic and low-income groups. This means that these adaptations could be transformed into successful adaptations more easily than others, if attention is paid to the dominant criterion. For example, if health care could be provided with low GHG emissions, it would move closer towards successful adaptation (high confidence). For other options, the criteria’s influence is more evenly distributed, as illustrated for the ‘diversification of livelihoods’ and the three options to address climate risks to peace and mobility, denoting multiple entry points to reduce the risk of maladaptive outcomes for these options.
Some criteria score highly across a number of options (Figure 17.11, central panel columns), showing that many adaptations do not pay attention to different trade-offs. For example, particular attention should be paid to prioritising benefits to low-income groups and leveraging the transformational potential of adaptation (having the largest number of large circles), that is, many evaluated options become maladaptive by exacerbating the vulnerability of low-income groups and by fortifying the status quo (medium confidence). On the contrary, most evaluated adaptation options are widely applicable across populations (benefits to humans) and deliver ecosystem services, while some also respect gender equity (largest number of small bubbles across options). Through these criteria, a number of adaptation options contribute to a higher potential for successful adaptation (high confidence).
17.5.1.1.3 Enabling successful adaptation and pre-empting maladaptation
Figure 17.11 | The potential contribution of 24 adaptation-related options to maladaptation and successful adaptation. The figure builds on evidence provided in the underlying sectoral and regional chapters and the Cross-Chapter Papers (SM17.1) to map 24 adaptation options identified as relevant to the eight Representative Key Risks (see Section 16.5) onto the adaptation–maladaptation continuum. It assesses the potential contribution of each of these adaptation options to successful adaptation and the risk of maladaptation. The figure permits a review of options in multiple ways: (a) looking at adaptation options (first column), one can see which adaptation options score highest across the criteria (the central rows). Results by options show which ones carry the highest risk of maladaptation (largest circles per row); (b): looking at criteria (top centre), one can see which criteria seem to be most influential to contribute to maladaptation outcomes (largest circles per central column); (c) panel on the right: merging the scores of each adaptation option across criteria helps highlight whether the options are likely to end up as successful adaptation or maladaptation.
Please refer to page 2616 to see Figure 17.11.
Procedural equity and justice: Participation is employed to enable procedures that aim to redress power imbalances, which are assumed to be the root causes of vulnerability (i.e., the reasons that lead certain people and places to be differentially vulnerable to climate risks) (Tschakert and Machado, 2012; Shackleton et al., 2015; Schlosberg et al., 2017; Ziervogel et al., 2017). However, participation is often constrained by gender (Cross-Chapter Box GENDER in Chapter 18), social status, unequal citizenship (as concerns education, access to information, finance and media) (Wallimann-Helmer et al., 2019), entrenched political interests (Shackleton et al., 2015; Chu et al., 2017), power dynamics (Rusca et al., 2015; Taylor and Bhasme, 2018; Kita, 2019; Omukuti, 2020; Taylor and Bhasme, 2020) or institutional shortcomings (Nightingale, 2017, in Nepal), which allow the most powerful access to funding and reinforce marginalisation of the powerless (Schipper et al., 2014; Khatri, 2018; McNamara et al., 2020). Vulnerability is also sometimes used as a pretext to exclude groups from participation, often because vulnerable groups do not own land and lack legal status, time or the ability to commit labour or material inputs for adaptation, all drivers of vulnerability in the first place (Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr, 2015; Camargo and Ojeda, 2017; Nagoda and Nightingale, 2017; Nightingale, 2017; Thomas and Warner, 2019; Mikulewicz, 2020).
