From Vulnerability to Adaptation to Climate Change: Food for Thoughts in Social Sciences - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 253

a state of relative balance between humans and their environment
which will never be fixed forever but rather which will constantly
require more or less profound readjustments. In other words, a great
challenge consists of not only attempting to determine today the future
forms of adaptation ( state dimension), but also identifying the broad
directions of adaptation ( strategy dimension) which will enable
maintaining a certain level of flexibility from the point of view of
implementation ( process dimension). This refers to the idea of
flexibility : given the uncertainties around the local impacts of climate
change, it seems obvious to us that building robust adaptation
strategies must rely on the one hand on the good understanding and
management of the adaptation process, and on the other hand on the
creation of reference visions for the future ('ideal' state of adaptation).
The notion of trajectory establishes the link between the two as it aims
to determine how to reach these reference points. So the adaptation
trajectory is necessarily a cross between the adaptation process , the
successive adaptation states and the adaptation strategies .
6.5. The action framework: thinking of adaptation as being at the
crossroads of anticipation and resilience
To summarize what has been said so far, and from a very general
point of view, it can be argued that the essence of adaptation is to
allow societies to reduce their degree of vulnerability to
environmental changes, both current and future, sudden and gradual.
So it can only be seen as dynamic and following three dimensions, as
it is a process , a state and a strategy . What remains to be discussed is
how this theoretical framework can turn into a framework for action.
The theoretical approach can be expressed as follows: the
challenge of adapting to climate change consists of making current
choices compatible with future environmental challenges. This is also
one of the principles at the basis of sustainable development with the
particularity in the context of climate change that we should start
adapting now to future environmental changes which, at local scales,
remain tainted with considerable uncertainties. In order to go beyond
the problem of uncertainty, which cannot possibly be used as an
excuse for the lack of action, an interesting option for societies