Climate Change and development - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 273

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Climate Change and
development
Adaptation through transformation
Karen O'Brien, Siri Eriksen, Tor Håkon Inderberg and
Linda Sygna
The climate is changing, and there is growing recognition that the social
dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation must be brought to the forefront
of development policies and practices. Until now, adaptation has most often
been approached in an instrumental way, by promoting technical interventions
and capacity-building programmes aimed at helping people to minimize the
risks associated with specific climate impacts, such as higher temperatures, more
frequent droughts, larger storm surges or greater flooding. Adaptation is being
absorbed into prevailing approaches to development and 'mainstreamed' into
every domain and sector, from health, education and governance, to agriculture,
water resources, infrastructure and many others. In fact, the unprecedented
risks associated with climate change - in the near term but especially in the long
term - indicate that transformation of development itself may be required if we
are to deal with climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, along with
other social and ecological challenges.
The lessons from this topic show that integrating adaptation into 'development
as usual' often ignores the real factors that drive vulnerability - like the interests,
power relations and structural factors that systemically perpetuate uneven
development, environmental degradation, resource depletion and growing
global emissions of greenhouse gases. The cases presented in this topic show that
adaptation is a question of much more than a set of projects or interventions to
reduce specific impacts of climate change: adaptation includes the dynamics of
living with change while also transforming the processes that have contributed
to vulnerability in the first place. Adaptation is a social process that involves
empowering individuals, households, communities, institutions and states, not
only to react and respond to the impacts of change, but also to challenge the
drivers of risk and promote alternative pathways to development.