Building adaptive Capacity in the informal settlements of maputo - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 21

making the consequences difficult to predict (Scheffer et al. 2012). From a
development and adaptation perspective, complexity means that we need
to recognize the unpredictable nature of change. It requires a mind-set shift
away from the assumption that understanding the current ecological and social
context is sufficient, and towards a focus on the capacity to adapt to changes not
yet known and yet to be experienced. Complexity in climate change introduces
the prospect of nonlinear change and uncertainty in climate projections, making
it hard to predict specific effects such as how the intensity of cyclones, or the
frequency of droughts and floods, may change in a warmer world. Uncertainty
is significant to adaptation not just as a result of our limited understanding of
climate science, but also because it is inherent in social-ecological contexts - in
the life of communities - due to the potential for surprises inherent in complex
systems.
In the context of climate change, resilience is significant as it refers to the
amount of disturbance or change that a system can withstand before it changes
function - with the attendant loss of wellbeing if the desirable characteristics
of human systems are lost. It does so by drawing attention to the different
connections and timescales that operate within systems. First, the resilience
perspective draws attention to cross-scale relationships : how the local, national
and international levels are connected by people, institutions and organizations
in ways that create links and dependencies between actors and changes to the
environment at these different levels. Second, it demands both shorter- and
longer-term thinking , drawing attention to the different speeds at which parts of
the system change or react (often more quickly in terms of individuals and more
slowly in terms of policy-making, for example) and the consequences of actions
today and in the future. Third, the resilience perspective alerts us to how these
relationships shift thresholds through the conscious or unconscious changing
of the socio-ecological system, in ways that can bring the system closer to the
tipping points (or thresholds) after which irreversible processes of change occur.
For example, national fertilizer subsidies may be linked (across scales) to the
loss of local fisheries through the gradual accumulation (over long timescales)
of nutrients in waterways, ultimately leading to the threshold beyond which
oxygenation declines rapidly, and the sudden and unexpected loss of productive
aquatic ecosystems occurs. The emergence of thresholds can be relatively easy
to spot in simple systems, but remains poorly understood in complex systems
- and in social systems in particular (Scheffer et al. 2012). For communities in
general, low resilience and the breaching of thresholds can mean unexpected
and fundamental changes to lives and livelihoods.
Climate change and its impacts have emerged as key variables that shift
thresholds and render communities vulnerable to what might otherwise be
minor shocks or stresses. Adaptive capacity is significant, as it represents the
ability of social actors to make deliberate changes and thus influences the
resilience of their social-ecological systems. However, case-study evidence
indicates that adaptation interventions by development actors are frequently