From Vulnerability to Adaptation to Climate Change: Food for Thoughts in Social Sciences - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 257

resilience mechanism, and for this reason, these are the two
complementary pillars behind the flexibility of societies and their
territories, and therefore of their ability to adapt to future climate
change.
It can be deduced that the long term is not the only time horizon to
be considered in terms of adaptation, and that the short time, that of
practical action, is just as important. In other words, the adaptation
strategies cannot dissociate themselves from the overlap in timescales,
so that actions today which are associated with immediate benefits are
not disconnected from the challenges of adaptation to climate change.
Therefore, many actions favoring adaptation (e.g. revising spatial
planning through the integration of risks, or the fighting of poverty
and social inequalities) can already be undertaken, on the condition of
course that they are understood with the objective of reinforcing both
the resilience of a system and its anticipation capacity.
6.6. Conclusion
This study proposes an approach to the vulnerability and the
adaptation to climate change concepts which enables a wide range of
researchers in social sciences (from different disciplines, with
different levels of scientific maturity) to grasp these and contribute,
through fieldwork, to improving knowledge.
The study of vulnerability to climate change, and even more so of
adaptation to climate change, arose relatively recently with the
realization of strong interactions between human societies and natural
phenomena. Although so-called hard sciences (climate science,
geomorphology, oceanography, etc.) play a crucial role in defining the
nature, the intensity and the frequency of future natural hazards and
environmental changes, the same applies to social sciences. The
responsibility of social sciences will be to shed light on the human
dimensions of vulnerability and risk. Various dimensions
(environmental, cultural, political, etc.) and timescales should
therefore be combined in order to achieve this and it is this
overlapping of dimensions and scales which sets the foundations for
the legitimacy for the concept of vulnerability.