A4 Extreme Adaptation to Climate Change
This research project investigates how societies around the world plan for and respond to the challenge of diminishing habitability due to accelerating climate change. Introducing the concept of “extreme adaptation”, the project focuses on proactive, strategically planned, and often large-scale responses to environments becoming less livable. Extreme adaptation strategies involve contested and conflictual decisions about where and how people can live or even survive, raising fundamental questions about what is considered “habitable”, and for whom. Bringing together expertise from political science, sociology, human geography, anthropology, communication studies, and climate modelling, the project offers crucial insights into the transformative strategies that societies may adopt as climate change increasingly redefines the boundaries of the habitable world.
By addressing the underexplored area of high-end climate adaptation scenarios, the project pursues three main objectives:
- developing the concept of extreme adaptation as a future-oriented logic and providing the first interdisciplinary, global analysis of such strategies;
- analysing the social conflicts and negotiations arising from extreme adaptation, assessing to what extent these measures are accepted, resisted, or create new vulnerabilities;
- investigating issues of security, defence, and control to understand how extreme adaptation not only protects but also redistributes risks, potentially generating new forms of conflict or emergency governance.
The research is structured into several interconnected work packages to develop a comprehensive understanding of extreme adaptation practices, focusing on the phases of planning, living with, and securing these transformative responses:
Work package 1: Negotiating future loss
Lead: Christine Hentschel / Ursula Schröder
We explore how governments process knowledge about shrinking habitability and develop plans for the potential abandonment or transformation of threatened regions and cities. And we compare societal struggles over what to give up and what to save, at what social and financial costs, in different world regions. Case studies analyse new drastic adaptation strategies in Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Work package 2: Living with shrinking habitability
Lead: Eray Çaylı
We examine innovative, community-level strategies such as floating communities or large-scale ecological infrastructure projects, including the new inequalities, vulnerabilities, and social contestations they may produce.
Work package 3: Defending extreme adaptation
Lead: Delf Rothe
We study the role of military and security actors, emerging technologies, and surveillance in managing the upheavals and conflicts triggered by extreme adaptation measures.