and Society (CLICCS)
Climate change: How well prepared are people worldwide?
4 November 2021, by University of Michigan; CLICCS
Photo: Y. Marion via Unsplash
As society experiences increasingly frequent and severe natural hazard events and environmental stressors—while making little progress at reducing carbon emissions—the need to adapt to the changing climate has become starkly clear. But what actions are we taking to adapt to climate change around the world—and how successful are our efforts?
A global network of 126 researchers sought to answer those questions, producing the most systematic and comprehensive assessment of implemented human adaptation to climate change to date. Dr. Jan Petzold und Tom Hawxwell from the Cluster of Excellence CLICCS at Universität Hamburg were involved. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that adaptation, as documented in the scientific literature, is mostly fragmented and incremental, undertaken primarily by individuals and households, rather than comprehensive and coherent efforts by communities and institutions.
Lead study author Lea Berrang Ford, Professor at the University of Leeds said "Our results provide a warning call: we found very little evidence of widespread and rapid preparedness at a scale that we think is likely to be adequate to avoid severe climate impacts."
It was a comprehensive collaborative effort by the team. First, an inventory was made of the scientific literature on climate change adaptation efforts from 2013-2020—screening more than 48,000 research articles in the process. Systematic literature review methods were then used to synthesize the resulting set of 1,682 articles.
Dr. Jan Petzold from CLICCS focused on small islands and Europe. "The studies are quite diverse in their methods and questions and show remarkable variety," says geographer Petzold. "However, this makes it more difficult for us to systematically assess progress and success." In many cases, negative side effects of adaptation measures were mentioned, for example on ecosystems or local populations. "This is an important point that should be studied systematically in the future," Petzold said.
Drilling down on the specific findings of the study, the researchers noted that behavioral adjustments by individuals and households are more prevalent than any other type of response, largely motivated by drought and precipitation variability. Local governments and civil society are engaging in risk reduction across all sectors and regions, particularly in response to flooding. Urban technological and infrastructural adaptations to flood risk are prevalent in Europe, while shifts in farming practices dominate reporting from Africa and Asia.
Despite increasing evidence of adaptation responses, however, University of Delaware disaster researcher and co-author A.R. Siders notes that the study found very little evidence that current adaptation efforts actually reduced risk.
“The idea that people, communities, and nations are taking action across a wide range of hazards and sectors is encouraging,” said Siders. “At the same time, I was surprised by how incremental that adaptation is.” In this paper, the researchers did not assess whether current adaptation is sufficient to deal with climate change. “But I think the fact that so much adaptation was incremental should raise concerns and should inspire us to make assessing adaptation a priority.” Siders related that the “evidence gap” discovered has already inspired further research.
The reviews of the literature on adaptation are collected in the GAMI database (Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative). The initiative for GAMI came from several IPCC authors and other researchers, led by Lea Berrang-Ford. The scientific literature on climate change adaptation is poorly organized and highly diverse, so assessing the current state of research has been difficult for the IPCC. The GAMI database provides a first systematic map of global evidence on climate change adaptation and helps by enabling further systematic reviews.
Publication
Berrang-Ford L, Siders AR, Lesnikowski A et al (2021): A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change; Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 989–1000
GAMI – Global Adaptation Initiative