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Publications (63)
Climate change scenarios have significant implications for the livelihoods and food security of particular groups in society and will necessitate a range of adaptation actions. While there is a significant literature on the social as well as biophysical factors and limits to adaptation, less is known about the interactions between these, and what s...
This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulne...
This paper uses governance of water infrastructure in two settlements of Baltistan as an entry point to examine the co-production of power and vulnerability. Access to water and irrigated land is a critical factor in determining how the effects of disasters, such as flooding, are socially distributed within a community. At the same time, the govern...
Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualiz...
Climate change introduces new challenges for humanitarian aid through changing hazard patterns. The linkages between climate change and humanitarian aid are complex. While humanitarian organisations deal directly with vulnerable opulations, interventions and actions also form part of global politics and development pathways that are currentlygenera...
Climate change is a global and local challenge to both sustainable livelihoods and economic development. Tanzania as other countries of the world has been affected. Several studies have been conducted on farmers' perceptions and adaptation to climate change in the country, but little attention has been devoted to forest adjacent households in humid...
This paper reviews the current theoretical scholarship on maladaptation and provides some specific case studies—in the Maldives, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Bangladesh—to advance the field by offering an improved conceptual understanding and more practice‐oriented insights. It notably highlights four main dimensions to assess the risk of maladaptat...
Climate change is among the key challenges that may influence livelihoods of people in Tanzania. Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) are among the forest products that serve as livelihood resources in the face of climate stresses. However, little is known on the extent to which NTFPs enhance the adaptive capacity of households adjacent to forests in...
This article investigates the role of ‘illicit’ activities in shaping vulnerability dynamics and exemplifies the role of subjectivities and authority in the politics of adaptation. Through drawing on data from several areas in Kitui County in Kenya, the article shows how people are able to use illicit strategies very differently, with differential...
This book presents a new perspective on adaptation to climate change. It considers climate change as more than a problem that can be addressed solely through technical expertise. Instead, it approaches climate change as an adaptive challenge that is fundamentally linked to beliefs, values and worldviews, as well as to power, politics, identities an...
Scope, Delineations, and Definitions: Livelihoods, Poverty, and Inequality Understanding the impacts of climate change on livelihoods and poverty requires examining the complexities of poverty and the lives of poor and non-poor people, as well as the multifaceted and cross-scalar intersections of poverty and livelihoods with climate change. This ch...
This article examines current adaptation strategies developed by local farmers against climate change effects in Kilombero District. Research questions guided the study include; what are the past and current climatic stresses? What are local farmers’ perception on climate change and response to the adverse climatic stresses? What are institutions a...
Local strategies to manage climate variability are key to adapting to climate change in the long term. We investigate how local adaptive strategies are socially organised through a study of Øystre Slidre, a Norwegian mountain farming community operating close to the climatic margins. Farmers actively use informal social relations in accessing equip...
Although many governments are assuming the responsibility of initiating adaptation policy in relation to climate change, the compatibility of "governance-for-adaptation" with the current paradigms of public administration has generally been overlooked. Over the last several decades, countries around the globe have embraced variants of the philosoph...
Frequent droughts and conflicts are key challenges faced by nomadic pastoralists in Kenya's drylands. Few options exist for alternative livelihoods. This article investigates the potential of collecting plant gums and resins for livelihood diversification and for contributing to sustainable adaptation to climate change in Kenya's drylands. Observat...
This article investigates how pastoral and agropastoral populations interact in adapting to climate variability and change, particularly to drought. Interactions within trade, livestock and human mobility, and accessing forest resources are critical to local adaptive capacity in Kenya's drylands. Qualitative interview data collected between 2004 an...
Climate adaptation has become a pressing issue. Yet little attention has been paid to the consequences of adaptation policies and practices for sustainability. Recognition that not every adaptation to climate change is a good one has drawn attention to the need for sustainable adaptation strategies and measures that contribute to social justice and...
This paper examines how double exposure to economic and environmental stressors – and the interaction between the two – affect smallholder farmers in Mozambique's Limpopo River Basin. Studying two case study villages we find that people, in general, are resilient to environmental stressors. However, most households show less resilience to the socio...
In this paper, we investigate adaptive capacity in a developed country context through a case study of how the housing sector undertakes local adaptation action in Norway. A particular concern is climate adapted solutions in the design and construction of prefabricated houses in response to the large geographic variations in climate. Two main resea...
In this paper, we investigate the ways in which climate stressors and economic changes related to liberalisation alter the local vulnerability context. Household and key informant data from two villages in Mozambique are analysed. First, we explore how changes such as increased market integration, altered systems of agricultural support, land tenur...
The Southern African Savannas Network and the Southern African Vulnerability Initiative used study areas and information from a wide range of sources to assess threats and opportunities to savanna sustainability from a natural and social science perspective, respectively. This paper describes an attempt to synthesise their findings using structural...
Using a human security perspective, we investigate how the history of land tenure changes has driven sustainability in southern African savannas. The paper examines four countries—Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Two research questions are addressed: first, how has colonial land tenure and distribution affected people's options and...
In this article, we argue that people's adjustments to multiple shocks and changes, such as conflict and drought, are intrinsically political processes that have uneven outcomes. Strengthening local adaptive capacity is a critical component of adapting to climate change. Based on fieldwork in two areas in Kenya, we investigate how people seek to ac...
The need to mainstream adaptation to climate change into development planning and ongoing sectoral decision-making is increasingly recognised, and several bilateral and multilateral development agencies are starting to take an interest. Over the past years at least six development agencies have screened their project portfolios, generally with two...
We address the issue of how to develop credible indicators of vulnerability to climate change that can be used to guide the
development of adaptation policies. We compare the indicators and measures that five past national-level studies have used
and examine how and why their approaches have differed. Other relevant indicator studies of social face...
The need to address both poverty and vulnerability to climate change can be considered two of the major challenges facing human society in the 21st century. While the two concepts are closely interconnected, they are nonetheless distinct. A conceptual understanding of the relationship between vulnerability and poverty is presented, and the types of...
In this article, we discuss how two interpretations of vulnerability in the climate change literature are manifestations of different discourses and framings of the climate change problem. The two differing interpretations, conceptualized here as ‘outcome vulnerability’ and ‘contextual vulnerability’, are linked respectively to a scientific framing...
The need to address both poverty and vulnerability to climate change can be considered two of the major challenges facing human society in the 21st century. While the two concepts are closely interconnected, they are nonetheless distinct. A conceptual understanding of the relationship between vulnerability and poverty is presented, and the types of...
Most European assessments of climate change impacts have been carried out on sectors and ecosystems, providing a narrow understanding of what climate change really means for society. Furthermore, the main focus has been on technological adaptations, with less attention paid to the process of climate change adaptation. In this article, we present an...
Conflict and violence are important features of many rural environments in East Africa but little is known about how they affect patterns of coping and adaptive behaviour. This paper considers the influence of conflict and violence on household strategies for coping with climate stress in dryland sites in Kenya. Conflict and violence severely affec...
We investigate how smallholder farmers at two sites in Kenya and Tanzania cope with climate stress and how constraints and opportunities shape variations in coping strategies between households and over time during a drought. On the basis of this analysis, we draw out implications for adaptation and adaptive policy. We find that households where an...
Global warming is likely to lead to a variety of changes in local climatic conditions, including potential increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events such as drought, floods, and storms. Present capacity to respond to and manage climatic variability, including extreme events, is an important component of adjustments to clim...
The need to mainstream climate change adaptation into development assistance is increasingly recognised, yet most bilateral and multilateral development agencies are only just starting to take an interest. Over the past five years a few development agencies have screened their project port-folios, generally with two goals in mind: (i) to ascertain...
This chapter discusses household coping mechanisms during the 1996 drought in Kitui, a dryland agricultural area in Kenya. The 1996 drought and its effects on farmer households are described. Most households exhausted their food stocks several months before the next harvest was due in 1997. The alternative sources of food and income to which most h...
The article examines the role institutions play in climate adaptation in Norway. Using examples from two municipalities in the context of institutional responses to floods, we find, first, that the institutional framework for flood management in Norway gives weak incentives for proactive local flood management. Second, when strong local political a...
In this report, we examine how climate change impacts may intersect and interact with other stressors in the Barents Sea Ecoregion (BSEr). We investigate the vulnerability of the BSEr to both climate change and increased transport activity, particularly in relation to oil and gas transport from Western Russia in order to develop a preliminary frame...
In this paper, we discuss two competing interpretations of vulnerability in the climate change literature and consider the implications for both research and policy. The first interpretation, which can
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This paper provides an overview of the Norwegian climate policy and of the practical implications of preparing Norway for climate change, with special emphasis on the challenges confronting the built environment. Although the Norwegian government has been relatively proactive in instituting measures aimed at halting global climate change, less atte...
Abstract While resource conflicts and violence are evident in many dryland areas of East Africa, there is a lack of systematic knowledge,of how,they affect household,livelihoods and in particular capacities and ways,of coping,with drought and other climate stresses. With few exceptions, analytic frameworks for assessing vulnerability in drylands do...
Trees and wild plants provide impoverished farmers in Kenya and Tanzania an alternative subsistence base in times of drought. These kind of local interactions tend to be ignored when climate changes are discussed at the global level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released a report that claims that the world's poorest...
