Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

244 market insurance models) or via scarcity and price signals (via water metering). Third, there is the potential for adaptation to enhance social justice, although this has not been the focus of this paper. Adaptation measures, for example the creation of sustainable urban landscapes that offer free, cool public spaces and reduce flood risks, could improve the quality of life for residents and facilitate more cohesive community living spaces. DISCUSSION Methods This paper began with a brief review of methodologies used to inform adaptation decision making. This analysis has implications for the governance of adaptation. On one level, over-reliance on top-down assessment techniques may tend to hide the social nature of vulnerability and lead to adaptation strategies that fail to protect the most vulnerable. This would be the consequence of focusing on the size of a risk, or its aggregate costs, rather than on the social nature of the risk: who will suffer harm as a result of that risk. As has been seen from the case studies, vulnerability to multiple climate impacts tends to overlap for certain social groups, namely those with low adaptive capacity, who now tend to be marginalized and disadvantaged in society. The implications of this for adaptation governance are that more bottom-up analyses should be used to inform adaptation policy, incorporating procedural elements, such as more consultation with vulnerable groups, as well as methodological elements that base climate risk assessment more on current climate vulnerability and that focus more on identifying cross-cutting issues from different sectors. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment provides an interesting case. Although initially designed as an impacts-based risk assessment, the CCRA methodology was modified to better account for the social aspects of risks, perhaps partly in response to the evidence generated and put forward by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The CCRA methodology now includes a stage (step 5) to explicitly consider equity issues and social vulnerability. Within this stage, broad clusters of risks have been assessed using a Social Vulnerability Checklist (HRWallingford 2010). An evidence review report on social vulnerability to climate change impacts (Collingwood Environmental Planning, unpublished manuscript) was also prepared as part of the CCRA process to inform decision makers, though this has not yet been made public. Step 7 of the CCRA methodology, which develops risk metrics for each risk, also provides the opportunity to develop social metrics that can be used to measure changes in risks relevant to social justice, e.g., changes in the number of deprived households at risk from flooding (see HR Wallingford 2010). In these ways, the social nature of vulnerability is recognized in the CCRA, and attempts have been made to update the methodology to better account for social vulnerability. Top-down assessments can therefore be carried out in ways that do draw attention to the social nature of vulnerability and risk, although current evidence gaps make this difficult in practice. Governance The quadruple injustice of climate change challenges adaptation governance to become more just and to deliver more just outcomes. I introduce the concept of a new policy concept to transfer funds between high emitters and the vulnerable, based on the logic of the quadruple injustice. Public attitudes to fairness represent a barrier but also an opportunity for designing new, socially accepted climate change policies. Another report from the JRF Climate Change and Social Justice programme (Horton and Doran 2011) used focus groups to look at people’s sense of fairness in relation to behaviors and rules governing climate change. For example, they looked at collective antipathy toward “freeriding” behavior and public support for rules to prevent excessive consumption, specifically in situations of resource scarcity, such as climate change[3]). The report concludes that climate change regulations do not need to appeal solely to self-interest and to cost-saving opportunities, as many regulations and policy initiatives currently attempt to. Instead, regulations may be more successful if they appeal to people’s sense of fairness, based on the link between excessive consumption, i.e., emissions, and climate change (Horton and Doran 2011). Although the focus groups did not explicitly ask people about their sense of fairness in relation to adaptation, the results present an interesting question: could people’s sense of fairness be harnessed to address the quadruple injustice of climate change by transferring resources from high emitters to the most vulnerable? The logic behind this question is that a scientifically robust causal link can be established between excessive consumption, e.g., driving a high-emitting SUV or frequent flying, physical climate change, and impacts on vulnerable people, e.g., flooding a family living on low income. Although it is unlikely that an acceptable scheme could be designed for direct payments between emitters and vulnerable groups, there may be public support for policies that use revenues from taxes on high-emitting behavior to compensate or protect vulnerable groups, or preferably to invest in building resilience among vulnerable people. This, after all, is the logic applied to global negotiations on climate change, in which developed countries have agreed to provide significant financing to help the most vulnerable countries adapt, via mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund, in recognition of their historical emissions and greater financial capacity[4]. Public awareness of climate change, vulnerability, and adaptation would need to improve significantly