I had made some notes for a blog post just
before the Christmas Holiday, but didn’t have the chance to post them then. So,
here a few notes from December.
On Monday 16 December, I attended a
lecture by Frans Berkhout, from King’s College in London, about limits to
climate change adaptation. He explained that he and several co-authors studied
limits to climate change adaptation as a concept, in a chapter for the Working
Group 2 part of the coming IPPC report (scheduled to be released end of March 2014).
They developed this concept of limits to adaption on the notion of
discontinuity of current practices. That is, adaptation limits have been
reached when adaption actions can no longer secure the practices and objectives
strived for by an actor; and when losses due to climate change are considered intolerable.
Afterwards, the discussion centred around the question: but who is to decide and identify what
unacceptable damages are, and based on what? The announcement poster with an
abstract of the presentation can be found here: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/includes/documents/events/2408/101-Limits_to_adaptation_to_climate_change.pdf
There were two papers that week, which
had caught my attention. The first one I found on the blog from Art Dewulf
(from Wageningen University in the Netherlands). This is the link to his blog: http://artdewulf.blogspot.co.uk/. He announced that an article on ‘The role of knowledge
and power in climate change adaptation governance: a systematic review’ authored
by Martijn Vink, himself and Catrien Termeer, has recently been published in
the journal Ecology & Society (link to the article: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol18/iss4/art46/). In this article, they observe that
knowledge and power are discussed in rather a static way in the far majority of
the literature on governance for climate change adaption. They argue that a
more dynamic understanding of knowledge and power would better reflect the
complex and ambiguous context of climate change adaptation.
The second paper that got my attention
was an article on ‘The adaptive capacity wheel: a method to assess the inherent
characteristics of institutions to enable the adaptive capacity of society’, by
Joyeeta Gupta, Catrien Termeer, Judith Klostermann and five other co-authors, published
in the journal Environmental Science & Policy in 2010. In this paper, the
authors propose an assessment framework assisting “academics and social actors
to assess if institutions stimulate the adaptive capacity of society to respond
to climate change” with six dimensions, being: variety, learning capacity, room
for autonomous change, leadership, availability of resources and fair
governance (Gupta et al., 2010, p. 459).
On Wednesday the 18th,
Duncan Russel and I had a skype meeting with our colleague Tim Taylor to
discuss the approach to study the UK climate change adaptation cases, for the
BASE project. Our colleague Tim Taylor also works for the University of Exeter,
though not in Exeter. He is located at the European
Centre for Environment and Human Health, in Truro, in Cornwall; which is
a 3-hour-journey from Exeter. Tim Taylor
will study climate change adaptation in relation to human health, for the case
of Cornwall, and for the case of the UK. We made a start in coordinating the
research approach; we will work on further, and meet again early February. The
meeting in February will be a live physical meeting, and Duncan Russel and I
will go down to Cornwall. I haven’t been in Cornwall yet and I am very much
looking forward to doing so!
