Community-based adaptation and development practice

Community-based adaptation has emerged as an important new topic in international development. Its distinctive approach, in which responses to climate change are locally developed by the affected population, is increasingly understood as necessary to support those whose livelihoods and lives are most threatened by climate change. Today, intergovernmental bodies and non-governmental organizations alike are engaged in community focused adaptation projects, funded by national and international donors who recognize the significance and urgency of the challenge being faced. These initiatives are supported by a growing body of networks, conferences and publications. Among these, the Community Based Adaptation Exchange online resource centre lists more than 700 members from development, environment and research organizations, while the 2010 International Conference on Community-based Adaptation drew more than 170 delegates from 38 countries, and gave rise to a new global initiative to 'promote the exchange of knowledge about community-level adaptation to climate change'. A year later, at the 2011 conference numbers swelled to more than 300. Community-based adaptation, a topic that was more or less unknown at the turn of the century, now occupies an important place in both climate change and development debates.

Yet for all the rapid growth in interest, community-based adaptation remains a new concept whose meaning is still to be fully understood. Most interpretations agree on the need to increase community understanding of the challenges that climate change represents and to develop responses that build on local knowledge. Awareness raising and participatory approaches are combined with exposure to new livelihood or risk reduction strategies, enabling communities to develop locally appropriate solutions to locally defined problems. The specifics of implementation necessarily vary according to the context and draw on different pools of knowledge and experience. Communities faced with an increased risk of flooding, for example, require access to very different information and technologies to those faced with the emergence of new pests and diseases, or the gradual loss of dependable water sources. This process of supporting communities to develop responses to the challenges they face is a crucial step, and in some interpretations is the goal of community-based adaptation. In these cases, supporting the mechanisms through which communities create changes to their lives and livelihoods is very much a secondary concern to the provision of appropriate adaptation outcomes.

The premise of this book is different. The starting point is that community-based adaptation must be defined by a balance between actions that support the ongoing ability to change, and those that respond to current challenges. While meeting immediate needs will always be a priority, it should not become an end in itself. Rather, current challenges offer an entry point for actions that build the capacity to adapt: the overarching objective is to support the ability of communities to face an uncertain future. Reflecting a growing consensus, adaptive capacity in this book describes the component of an adaptation intervention that prepares communities for a changing climate, enabling them to better secure their own adaptation outcomes.

In community-based adaptation, adaptive capacity draws attention to the processes through which communities are able to make changes to their lives and livelihoods in response to emerging environmental change. As such, adaptive capacity challenges development actors to think in terms of how networks of relationships define the distribution, access and control of material and knowledge assets. It means that the quality of relationships, determined by characteristics such as power, culture and gender, are drawn into the foreground so that interventions can identify the constraints on local decision making, looking across scales rather than at communities in isolation. This perspective demands a shift in thinking away from needs-based programming, having more in common with empowerment-focused development narratives such as rights-based approaches. The increasing risk of four degrees of global warming suggests that frequent livelihood changes and even radical transformations may become necessary for many. In these circumstances, a business as usual approach to development practice is inadequate, and the necessity of securing adaptive capacity is thrown into sharp relief. The alternative to empowering communities to engage in processes of change is to leave them permanently dependent on the whim of governments who have routinely failed the most vulnerable, or on non-governmental actors whose funding and mandate cannot be relied on to provide indefinite support. The purpose of this book is to respond to this challenge, by addressing the need to better understand adaptive capacity, and to rethink development practice in terms of how it can be best supported.

Uncertain futures

At the heart of adaptation lies a paradox. The driving force behind much of the interest in adaptation is the knowledge that climate change is upon us and that the impacts will be felt, first and worst, in the world's most vulnerable communities. Yet, at the same time, these anticipated impacts are poorly understood, and the uncertainty is greatest in many of the world's least developed countries.

While advances in climate science mean that we now have an unprecedented view of the future of the earth system, many of the precise implications remain unclear: predictions of rainfall rates, the likely frequency of extreme weather events, and regional changes in weather patterns cannot be made with certainty (Ensor and Berger, 2009a). Box 1.1 summarizes the multiple forms of uncertainty that make predicting the impacts of climate change so difficult. But the presence of uncertainty should not be confused with a lack of knowledge: the issue is to develop a clear understanding of what climate science is offering. The impact of greenhouse gas emissions is well established and warming of the global climate throughout the coming century is certain. Climate change is already being experienced in many parts of the world, not least through rising sea levels, and climate models are clear in anticipating change at an unprecedented pace and scale. As time passes the emerging science continues to suggest that the changes may be more profound and with us sooner than first thought (Anderson and Bows, 2011).

However, while the global average temperature change can be anticipated with reasonable confidence for a given rate of future greenhouse gas emissions, predicting precipitation patterns and localized weather impacts at decadal to centennial timescales is beyond reach. In other words: 'The take-home message for policy makers is that for regions as small as most countries, knowing the global mean temperature leaves significant uncertainty in the local response. ... [O]ur knowledge of vulnerability to natural variability comes more from observations and science than from modelling.' (Smith, 2009: 145)

The established approach to accounting for uncertainty in climate models is to generate 'ensemble' predictions, in which the range of outputs provided by several different climate models are compared. Yet for some scientists, even the diversity of results obtained from all currently available models fails to fully describe future uncertainty, even for fixed future emissions (Stainforth et al., 2007; Smith, 2009). This is of central importance to adaptation. Whilst mitigation activities are rightly driven by the need to avoid dangerous climate change, adaptation planning relies on understanding what climate change means in a particular location. As a result, it is all too easy to assume that adaptation can and should follow climate change predictions. But climate models are not 'truth machines' that provide predictions (Desai et al., 2009: 70). Rather, they are increasingly refined simulations that are ultimately limited by our understanding of climate (and computing) science. In many contexts there is no agreement whether, for example, rainfall is likely to increase or reduce. What, then, should adaptation to climate change mean in these circumstances? How can adaptation planning proceed in the face of such uncertainty?

Adaptation unpacked

First and foremost, adaptation must avoid becoming an exercise in designing optimal solutions to anticipated climate change impacts. Options for changes to lives and livelihoods need to be robust in the face of unpredictable future weather patterns by ensuring that altered livelihood strategies do not only bring benefit if climate change plays out as predicted (Boyd et al., 2009). Tailoring smallholder agricultural strategies to a particular climate future, for example, risks maladaptation and will always be a mistake as long as uncertainty remains in climate projections. Rather, adaptation needs to tackle uncertainty head-on by ensuring that livelihoods retain and enhance the ability to ride out or respond to unexpected events.

Efforts to reduce current vulnerability to climate change impacts may form part of an adaptation strategy, but should be employed in combination with measures that specifically address future uncertainty. This can be achieved through a three-pronged approach, introduced in an analysis of eight early examples of community-based adaptation published in Understanding Climate Change Adaptation (Ensor and Berger, 2009a), and summarized here in Table 1.1 and explored in Table 1.2.

In this view, vulnerability reduction is an important component of adaptation to climate change for several reasons. In some cases, such as sea-level rise or glacial lake outburst flood risks, existing climate change threats can be clearly identified and adaptation measures that reduce vulnerability to the threat are a priority. But in most circumstances, establishing an unambiguous causal link to climate change may be impossible as attribution of weather related phenomenon is hugely problematic. By definition, climate is the average of weather conditions over a multi-decadal timescale; individual events or even multi-year phenomenon such as persistent drought can at best be described as consistent with anticipated climate change. Actions that reduce vulnerability to these threats are part of adaptation in the sense that they address existing challenges that are anticipated to persist or recur into the future. Often taking the form of technical solutions, they deal with conditions that are assumed to be linked to climate change.

The natural variability in weather conditions and the inevitable uncertainty over the direction of future climate change mean that attempts at vulnerability reduction should focus on 'no regrets' strategies whose short-term benefit is maintained regardless of future prevailing weather conditions. Irrespective of attribution, such interventions also provide an entry point for those seeking to work with communities on the less tangible aspects of climate change. When addressed through community-based actions that raise awareness of the future challenges of climate change, existing vulnerabilities offer the opportunity to introduce an appreciation of climate risk in how current challenges are met. This approach embodies the maxim that community-based adaptation is not so much about what a community is doing, but why and with what knowledge (Huq, 2007). And when documented and shared, such actions also expand the global pool of knowledge on the climate-related challenges that poor communities face. This collection and redistribution of knowledge is increasingly recognized as an important precondition of effective adaptation as climate change brings new and unexpected challenges the world over.

While vulnerability reduction may be able to provide relief from climate-related challenges that are being experienced in the immediate term, a key question remains: how should adaptation deal with the problem of an uncertain future climate? What does a response to climate change that addresses as yet unknown impacts look like? The answer lies in shifting the focus of adaptation towards dealing with uncertainty directly (Boyd et al., 2009; Boyd and Juhola, 2009). This means working with communities in ways that strengthen their ability to cope with and recover from surprises, and strengthen their capacity to make changes to their lives as our knowledge of climate change and its likely impacts improves. Here, these strategies are referred to as strengthening absorbing capacity (the ability to absorb or cope with unexpected disturbances, often termed 'resilience') and adaptive capacity (the ability to change in response to climate change). These terms, adapted from Ensor and Berger (2009a), are explored in more depth in chapter 2.

Adaptive and absorbing capacity are not independent of vulnerability: as the examples in Table 1.2 suggest, increasing a household or community's ability to cope or adapt should help reduce vulnerability to the broadest possible range of hazards. Similarly, 'no regrets' approaches to vulnerability reduction frequently also increase the ability to absorb disturbances. For example, the introduction of multiple livelihood strategies or a shift in planting practices to include a diversity of varieties are both strategies that address the vulnerability of rural communities to the failure of crops due to reduced rainfall rates. Yet by increasing the diversity of income generating activities they also address a wide variety of future conditions. This is a result that emerges because 'no regrets' vulnerability reduction includes an appreciation of uncertainty, without which vulnerable livelihood practices may just as easily be replaced with a strategy that is best suited to the current climate, such as where saline intolerant crops, for example, are replaced with varieties whose yields are only able to cope with the current levels of salinity.

Adaptive capacity and development practice

The premise of this book is that adaptive capacity, while now part of the development lexicon, has still to be fully explored in terms of its meaning for development practice. Here, as elsewhere, it captures the ability to carry out adaptation measures. These may be aimed at reducing vulnerability to specific weather-related threats (a new seawall, adoption of heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, vaccines, upgraded drainage systems) or at building livelihoods better able to cope with and recover from unexpected events (crop insurance schemes, agricultural diversification, enhanced water use efficiency). The vulnerability of communities to future climate change therefore depends in part on their adaptive capacity, through which timely adaptation measures can be adopted. This perspective encompasses not only the knowledge and resources that a community is able to deploy in adapting to climate change, but also the broader institutional and policy environment that supports or constrains decision making at the local level. While community-based adaptation rightly draws attention to the needs of the most vulnerable communities, the lens of adaptive capacity also locates those communities within a broader context, suggesting that action on adaptation will not only be necessary at the local level.

This understanding of the components of adaptation presents a particular challenge. Vulnerability and absorbing capacity are familiar territory for those concerned with development and disaster risk reduction. Working with communities to identify existing vulnerabilities and enhance the ability to cope with and recover from shocks is at the heart of many development organizations' praxis. This provides secure foundations of knowledge and experience from which to address the emerging challenges of climate change through community-based adaptation. But it also carries a risk that adaptation projects will be predicated on familiar methods, taking the need to reduce existing vulnerability to climate risks as the major challenge to be addressed. Strategies for adaptive capacity may then follow from this focus, but this is not the same as identifying and addressing in their own right the local barriers to adaptation.

In a case study representative of the majority considered in Understanding Climate Change Adaptation (Ensor and Berger, 2009a), a Sri Lankan project focused on the failure of hybrid rice varieties following saline intrusion. The approach taken aimed to revive consistently poor yields (vulnerability reduction). The method employed variety diversity (thereby strengthening the ability to cope with environmental disturbances) whilst developing the skills and opportunities needed to productively employ new varieties (building adaptive capacity). On one level, this approach satisfies the need to address uncertainty by including absorbing and adaptive capacity building measures. But by starting from known vulnerabilities, the intervention skewed the purpose of adaptation, with work focused on the well-understood challenge of variety access and selection, driven by the need for vulnerability reduction. The realities of future change were overlooked and thus adaptive capacity building measures emerged as a consequence of vulnerability reduction – building skills in employing new varieties – rather than through an independent focus on the measures necessary for meeting uncertainty. Climate change impacts other than salinity were not considered and therefore access to forecasting information (and an appreciation of its uncertain and statistical nature) were not perceived to be an essential step towards enabling future adaptation actions. This fundamental drawback was evident in several of the case studies and led to new agricultural practices and infrastructure being undermined by unanticipated climate variability, betraying a 'business as usual' mindset in which current conditions are assumed to be a sufficient indication of the future.