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Is adaptation success a flawed concept?

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 572–574 (2019)Cite this article

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The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation and invites parties to review the effectiveness of adaptation actions. However, the measurement of adaptation success remains elusive. Focusing on the capabilities of households and governments to pursue a range of adaptation futures provides a more robust foundation.

The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation (Article 7, para. 1) and invites Parties to “review the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation” in a global stocktake (Article 7, para. 14c). Creating universally applicable measures of adaptation success remains elusive, however, given that most adaptation projects are implemented at the local level and start from wildly differing baseline conditions. Further, the adaptation process is never truly ‘finished’ in a changing, evolving climate1. Berrang-Ford et al.2 propose tracking government adaptation policy instruments as a way to assess progress. However, these and other approaches do not address what constitutes ‘success’, focusing instead on government planning, or how vulnerability is changing — and leaving open the questions of vulnerability of whom, to what, and who decides. In this Comment, we propose that the focus should be on bolstering and measuring the capabilities of individuals and institutions — capabilities that are necessary to pursue a range of resilient futures and adaptation goals.

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Acknowledgements

This comment evolved from a special session on adaptation success convened by the authors at Adaptation Futures 2018, the Fifth International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Cape Town. We thank the over 100 session participants from around the world, including participants from government agencies, donors, non-governmental organizations, students, humanitarian agencies, academics, policy-makers and members of civil society. L.D. acknowledges the support of US National Science Foundation grant no. 1354542. A.P., N.S. and F.A.’s time was supported by the HI-AWARE project under Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia with financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development and the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. The views expressed in this work are those of the creators and do not necessarily represent those of the UK Government’s Department for International Development, the International Development Research Centre, Canada or its Board of Governors, or UN Environment, and are not necessarily attributable to their organizations. All responsibility for the content remains with the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Studies Program and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Lisa Dilling

  2. TERI — School of Advanced Studies, Hyderabad, India

    Anjal Prakash

  3. UN Environment, Washington, DC, USA

    Zinta Zommers

  4. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu, Nepal

    Farid Ahmad

  5. School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Nuvodita Singh

  6. Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Sara de Wit

  7. Cities Research Institute (CRI) and School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Johanna Nalau

  8. Department of Environmental Studies, University of New England, Biddeford, ME, USA

    Meaghan Daly

  9. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Kerry Bowman

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  1. Lisa Dilling
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Correspondence to Lisa Dilling.

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Dilling, L., Prakash, A., Zommers, Z. et al. Is adaptation success a flawed concept?. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 572–574 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0539-0

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