Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

238 may ultimately be more important than exposure in determining who adapts and who suffers during climate events. A disadvantage of bottom-up assessments is that they are resource-intensive and generally only apply to specific local areas. A number of qualitative, mostly bottom-up, studies on the social nature of vulnerability to climate change are referred to below. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment The UK has generally been considered a forerunner in adaptation. For example, it has initiated various state-of-the-art processes and projects in relation to climate science, including the production of UK Climate Projections User Interface (http:/ukclimateprojections. metoffice.gov.uk/) and the establishment of the UK Climate Impacts Programme in 1997 to support stakeholders and decision makers in using climate science to achieve adaptation. In 2008 the UK parliament passed the Climate Change Act, which, among other things, created a duty to conduct a Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) every five years. The first CCRA was laid before Parliament in January 2012, with an accompanying report on the economics of climate resilience (ECR) completed in 2013. The reports will play an important role in influencing the UK National Adaptation Programme 2013 and its implementation. The CCRA includes features of both a top-down, impacts-based assessment and an objective-based one. It takes as its starting point a list of over 700 impacts, identified after considering climate projections, reviewing existing evidence, and consulting with stakeholders. This long list of impacts was reduced to around 100 key risks, using a methodology that considered the magnitude of the impact and the level of confidence associated with the evidence (HR Wallingford 2010). The CCRA aims to identify all climate risks to the UK, but also considers risks in light of key government objectives, not least as the result of risk identification processes that consider Departmental Adaptation Plans, which themselves look at key departmental policies when identifying climate risks (HR Wallingford 2010). The CCRA is based on a series of 12 sectoral assessments, each of which is led by a separate sector expert and team. The sectors covered by the CCRA include: agriculture, biodiversity and ecosystem services, built environment, business, industry and services, energy, floods and coastal erosion, forestry, health, marine and fisheries, transport, and water. This has implications for the way in which social issues are captured – or missed – in the assessment. Many if not all of these 12 sectors can be relevant to social justice and inequality in some way; built environment, floods and coastal erosion, health, and water are perhaps most relevant. However, by taking a sector approach, there is a danger that impacts are considered in terms of their effect on the functioning of the sectoral system and not on the lives of people affected by that system, e.g., focus on the number of people suffering from heat stress, rather than which people in society are likely to suffer harm as a result of heat stress. Another key feature of the CCRA, and the ECR report, is that they are both based on existing evidence. The majority of climate change research, particularly quantitative analyses, has taken place within the fields of physical and natural science. CCRA and ECR results are therefore likely to be skewed by the available evidence (Prof. Martin Parry, CCRA Synthesis Report Peer Review, unpublishedmanuscript) and may underestimate the social nature of vulnerability and risk. As well as underestimating the social nature of risk, the scope of the CCRA was limited to impacts within the UK, although as recent evidence suggests, indirect impacts on the UK resulting from climate change elsewhere in the world may be as significant, if not more so, than direct impacts at home (Foresight 2011). In particular, of the indirect impacts identified in the Foresight report, health, security and migration impacts may affect some groups in society more than others. The CCRA is the first national assessment of its kind and embodies the proactive approach to adaptation policy being taken in the UK. However, for various methodological reasons, not least the reliance on existing evidence, the first iteration of the CCRA may undervalue the social nature of climate impacts, risks, and vulnerability. The resulting policies may thus also fail to protect the most vulnerable members of UK society. Social justice and climate change Recognizing this possibility, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), a social policy research and development charity in the UK, initiated a research program on Climate Change and Social Justice (http: /www.jrf.org.uk/work/workarea/climate-change-and-social-justice ). The JRF program has funded various projects to improve the evidence base on the links between social justice and climate change mitigation and adaptation. I briefly review the results of a selection of projects from the first phase of that program. Three of the key research questions posed by these projects are: Who emits the most? Who is most vulnerable to climate impacts? Does adaptation protect the most vulnerable? Who emits the most? There is a strong correlation between household income and household emissions. A quantitative study by Fahmy et al. (2011) explored the nature of this link by compiling a new dataset that combines information on household income, consumption of household fuels, private road travel, public transport use, and domestic and international aviation. The report provides new insights into who is responsible for emitting how much carbon dioxide and identifies the relative contributions of different aspects of consumption to household carbon emissions (Fahmy et al. 2011). The relationship between emissions and income is clear. Higher income households