A DAPTING TO CLIMATE VARIABILITY AND CHANGE

Adapting to climate variability and change is an issue of climate risk management, where an organisation seeks to reduce any potential threats, and make the most of any opportunities that may arise as a result of climate change. This risk management entails developing and implementing adaptation strategies and actions. Adaptation is however, a complex, highly context specific, multifaceted issue. Aspects of adapting to climate change range from having or developing an awareness of the need for adaptation, and understanding the adaptation issue at hand, planning strategies and actions for dealing with these issues, implementing them, and then monitoring and reviewing their performance, as well as the risks themselves, as they change over time. Adaptation then is a continuous process of awareness and understanding, planning, implementation, and monitoring and review (Moser

& Ekstrom 2010).

22

Each of these different aspects or phases of adaptation require the application of different methods, approaches and skills, in order to make progress. In the awareness and planning phases making progress may largely depend on generating an information or evidence base and understanding of how a given system functions in order to inform the development of effective adaptation strategies. At the implementation phase however, making progress may largely depend on a number of institutional, organisational and general governance issues (Berkhout 2011, Wilby & Vaughan 2011). Ensuring that suitable monitoring systems are either already, or put into place, and that performance of adaptation strategies and risks are periodically reviewed, will largely depend on organisational issues relating to adequate resourcing. It is however, important to state that at all phases, the importance of stakeholder dialogue and engagement, should be appropriately considered (Rotter et al. 2013).

Moreover, whilst the emphasis on the use or relevance of a particular method or approach may shift from one phase to the next, the different phases are clearly interrelated, and should not be viewed or addressed with compartmentalized analysis. Accordingly, it should be clear that adaptation is a social process, where the ingredients for success are many and varied (Moser and Boykoff 2013).

1.2.1 Adaptation as risk management

This guidebook frames adapting to climate change as an issue of climate risk management.

We adopt the ISO 31000:2009 definition of risk, as being: “The effect of uncertainty on business objectives”, and risk is calculated as the product of the likelihood of a climate-related event, and the consequences. Risk can have both negative and positive consequences, which in this guidebook are referred to as threats and opportunities, respectively. All organisations, be they in the public or private sector, will have business plans and objectives, some of which may be affected by, or sensitive to climate-related events. Use of this language and concept of risk is used throughout this guidebook, and business objectives are taken to mean the values, goals, and targets that any organisation may have or desire to obtain.

These objectives can be analysed as to the effect that climate and other relevant factors e.g.

socio-economic and socio-political, may have on their successful achievement. A risk management framework provides a means within which to systematically analyse these risks, understand how they are generated as a result of the interaction of climate and non-climate factors, what the negative and positive consequences may be, and how we may be able to intervene to reduce threats and make the most of any opportunities. The risk management framework as applied to adaptation is shown schematically in figure 1.1.

23

Figure 1.1 Schematic representation of adaptation as a process of risk management.

Source: adapted from ISO31000:2009.

24

Box 1.1 Glossary of terms and concepts used

Various terms and concepts are used throughout this guidebook, and the key terms are defined below.

Adaptation: involves changes in social-ecological systems in response to actual and expected impacts of climate change in the context of interacting nonclimatic changes.

Adaptation strategies and actions can range from short-term coping to longer-term, deeper transformations, aim to meet more than climate change goals alone, and may or may not succeed in moderating harm or exploiting beneficial opportunities (Moser & Ekstrom 2010).

Adaptation assessment: The practice of identifying options to adapt to climate change and evaluating them in terms of criteria such as availability, benefits, costs, effectiveness, efficiency and feasibility (IPCC 2007b).

Adaptive capacity: the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes) to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences (IPCC 2007b).

Climate-related event: the way in which organisations are affected by climate change will be expressed through direct changes in climate variables such as temperature and precipitation, but also through changes in extreme events such as heatwaves, droughts, storms, flooding and wildfires. To aid the clarity of the text, we use the term climate-related event to refer to these different changes.

Decision-relevant information: is that which yields greater insight or understanding of an issue, which hopefully leads to better decisions being made (NRC 2009).

Model: an abstraction or simplification of how we understand a real world system to work.

The development and use of models is an essential part of the risk assessment stage of the risk management framework.

Risk: the effect of uncertainty on objectives (ISO 31000:2009). Risk is calculated as the product of the likelihood and consequences of a climate-related event. Risk entails both negative and positive consequences, which may present threats and opportunities to an organisation.

Risk management: the systematic application of management policies, procedures, and practices to the activities of communicating, consulting, establishing the context, and identifying, analysing, evaluating, treating, monitoring, and reviewing risk (ISO 31000:2009).

Robust decision making: a decision making framework which acknowledges our inability to predict the future with certainty, and thus seeks to minimise the regret associated with a given adaptation strategy, rather than seeking to develop an optimal strategy.

Scenario: a plausible and often simplified description of how the future may develop, based on a coherent and internally consistent set of assumptions about driving forces and key relationships IPCC (2007b).

Stakeholders: individuals, groups or organisations who can affect or be affected by the results of a decision (based on Freeman 1984).

Vulnerability: the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected (IPCC 2012).

25

1.2.2 Approaches to adaptation: “top-down” or “bottom-up”?

In the adaptation research arena there has been considerable discussion around the merits of what is known as a “top-down” or impacts-first approach to adaptation planning, in contrast to a more “bottom-up” thresholds-first approach, in providing decision-relevant information (Carter et al. 2007, Wilby & Dessai 2010). Decision-relevant information is that which yields greater insight or understanding of an issue, which hopefully leads to better decisions being made (NRC 2009). The “top-down” approach typically sees the application of a range of different quantitative models to the study of climate risks, and then seeks to identify adaptation strategies from these results. However, this approach is generally not structured around key thresholds or business objectives that may be important to an organisation, and as such, the analysis takes place in the absence of a well-defined decision making context, and consequently yields little insight to the decision making process. In contrast, the

“bottom-up” approach, seeks to understand the organisational context and causes of the way in which climate risks arise and why they are important, and is duly more grounded in the real-world of decision making, and thus may provide more decision-relevant information than a “top-down” approach. Accordingly, the classical “top-down” approach is not well suited to informing adaptation planning in practice.

It is however the case, and increasingly recognised, that the kinds of models that are typically associated with the “top-down” approach, can, and indeed should, be combined with the “bottom-up” approach when considering adaptation strategies or actions, that may play out over a number of decades (Lal et al. 2012, Turner et al. 2003). The issue is not the use of models themselves, but rather the way in which the analysis is structured i.e. around objectives and thresholds that are important to an organisation. In this guidebook, a risk based approach to adaptation is taken, which is an inherently “bottom-up” process, being as it is, concerned with the effect of uncertainty on business objectives. The use of models and climate data is entirely consistent, and indeed necessary to pursue this approach. These issues are summarised schematically in figure 1.2. As such, this guidebook seeks to provide a framework for the intelligent synthesis of the “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches (Mastrandrea et al. 2010a).