Adaptation to Climate Change
Authors: Schmidt-Thomé Philipp 
Published: May 2016

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Adaptation to climate change is the ability of a society or a natural system to adjust to the conditions that support life in a certain climate region, including weather extremes in that region. The current discussion on adaptation to climate began in the 1990s with the publication of the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientific results are mainly published internationally or at a national level, and political guidelines are written at transnational (e.g., European Union), national, or regional levels. But since the implementation of adaptation measures must be planned and conducted at the local level, a major challenge is to actually implement adaptation to climate change in practice. Needless to say, the challenges for implementation are rooted in a large number of uncertainties from long time spans to matters of scale, as well as with economic, political, and social interests. From a human perspective, climate change impacts occur rather slowly while local decision makers are engaged with daily business over much shorter time spans.

Among the obstacles to implementing adaptation measures to climate change are three major groups of uncertainties: (1) the uncertainties surrounding the development of our future climate, which include the exact climate sensitivity of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the reliability of emission scenarios and underlying storylines, and inherent uncertainties in climate models; (2) uncertainties about anthropogenically induced climate change impacts (e.g., long-term sea level changes, weather patterns, and extreme events); and (3) uncertainties about the future development of socioeconomic structures, economic development and stability, and overall political stability. Important challenges that add to these uncertainties involve current legislation (e.g., granting building permissions in potentially flood-prone areas and related economic interests).

Besides slow changes that influence areas such as vegetation zones, extreme events are a factor of major importance. In addition, many societies and their socioeconomic systems are not properly adapted to their current climate zones (e.g., intensive agriculture in dry zones) or to extreme events (e.g., housing built in flood-prone areas). Adaptation measures can be successful only by gaining common societal agreement on their necessity and overall benefit. Ways to identify and implement societal and economically acceptable adaptation measures also optimally include “no-regret” measures—measures that have at least one function of immediate social benefit as well as long-term, future benefit. To identify socially acceptable and financially viable adaptation measures successfully it is useful to employ structured communication measures that give all involved parties and actors a voice and a possibility to engage in the process of identifying adaptation measures that best fit collective needs.