Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

236 Social Justice and Adaptation in the UK by Magnus Benzie This article was originally published in Ecology & Society, 19(1), 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06252-190139 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license ABSTRACT Adaptation strategies and policies are normally based on climate impact assessments that fail to take account of the social nature and distribution of vulnerability to climate change. This is largely a product of the dominant assessment techniques that are used to inform such strategies and the limits of existing evidence. In this paper I contribute to filling gaps in the current adaptation literature by exploring the social nature of vulnerability and the potential for socially just adaptation. It does so by reviewing studies from the UK, in particular those under the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Climate Change and Social Justice programme. It finds that vulnerability to high temperatures and fluvial and coastal flooding, in terms of sensitivity, exposure, and the capacity to anticipate, respond, and recover, is concentrated in certain disadvantaged and socially marginalized groups, including those on low incomes. It also finds that both autonomous and planned adaptation may fail to protect the most vulnerable individuals and groups, and may even reinforce existing patterns of vulnerability in some cases, i.e., mal-adaptation, especially where they rely on unmediated market forces or where they fail to explicitly recognize aspects of social vulnerability in their design and implementation. I argue that social justice should be an explicit objective of adaptation strategy. Keywords: adaptation; social justice; vulnerability INTRODUCTION In recent years research and policy have begun to focus on the need to adapt to inevitable climate change. This requires decision makers at a range of scales, global to local, sectoral, etc., to assess the likely impacts of climate change to identify priorities for adaptation (Brown et al. 2011). To date, few adaptation assessments have considered the uneven distribution of climate impacts and vulnerability across groups and individuals within society. This is partly a result of the tools and methods that are used to inform adaptation policy. Another reason is that the task of assessing individuals’ and groups’ vulnerability to future change is highly complex, given large uncertainties about the direction and pace of future socioeconomic and climatic trends and events. This makes it difficult to say with certainty which groups or individuals are most vulnerable. Here, vulnerability to climate change, climate variability, and extreme events are defined as a function of exposure to climate impacts, sensitivity to those impacts, and the adaptive capacity of the people or systems impacted (following Blaikie et al. 1994, IPCC 2007). In this paper I take as a premise that society should and does care about social justice as a core value[1]. I also take the perspective that when assessing the impacts of climate change, the focus should be on who suffers, how much, when and how, and that adaptation should aim to be equitable as well as effective, efficient, and legitimate (after Adger et al. 2005). Adaptation should therefore strive to be socially just and to protect those who are most vulnerable to climate impacts. Adaptation research and methods Adaptation outcomes will only be as good as the methods and evidence used to inform adaptation decisions. Adaptation decision support methods include climate science, risk assessment, economic analyses, and vulnerability assessment. Climate science Decision makers take adaptation seriously because of the messages provided by climate science. Various general circulation models are used to project scenarios of future climate, which can be downscaled to model local-level impacts, e.g., precipitation, run-off, flooding, etc. Information of this type can be used to assess the likelihood and severity of future changes in climate and thereby identify priorities for adaptation. Methodologies based on this kind of top-down approach can loosely be termed “impacts-based” (see Brown et al. 2011). Impacts-based approaches tend to focus on physical and natural systems rather than social systems. This is because the drivers and mechanics of these systems are better known and already modeled to some extent in most cases. Models of the impacts of climate change on hydrology, including flooding, and coastal change are therefore fairly common (HRWallingford 2012); newmodels of physical systems, e.g., urban heat islands, are emerging (e.g., Hoffmann et al. 2012).