Read Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation for Free Online Page B

which seeks to build knowledge on vulnerability and adaptation from local studies worldwide). Susceptibility can be reduced by a wide range of possible actions including those taken before and after a climate-change-related impact has been felt.
    The separation of mitigation and adaptation by the UNFCCC may help international policy formulation, but it is intellectually problematic. Mitigation can most logically be viewed not as a separate domain but as a subset of adaptation. It is an adaptive act aimed at ameliorating or reversing the root causes of the anthropocentric forcing processes behind climate change. Changing lifestyles and technologies to reduce carbon are then acts of adaptation targeted at supporting mitigation. Bridges between adaptation and mitigation are being made. Already the need to consider mitigation when developing adaptation strategy is recognised by the engineering community in the concept of climate proofing (McEvoy
et al.
, 2006). The analysis presented in this book does not include mitigation acts or policy, but does include discussion on the cultural and social norms that shape development worldviews and acts; a line of analysis that is well suited to questions of mitigation and in this way offers an approach that can be developed to connect mitigation to the adaptation agenda.
    Adaptation occupies a pivotal position in the coproduction of risk and development (see Figure 2.1 ). Through this one phenomenon one can gain insightinto the social mechanisms leading to the distribution of winners and losers and identify opportunities and barriers to change as both risk and development coevolve. Too often, though, research and policy development on adaptation has focused on narrow technical or managerial concerns; for example, in determining water management or sea-defence and building structural guidelines. Wider questions of political regime form, social values and so on that direct technological and social development and risk have been acknowledged as root causes, but put in the background as too intangible or beyond the scope for adaptation work (Adger
et al.
, 2009c). Within the community of social researchers tackling climate change the social root causes are well acknowledged and amongst many policy-makers they are recognised too. Multilateral development agencies and NGOs such as WRI, WWF, Practical Action and CARE are taking a lead and tools are being developed to help policy-makers, who have understood the complexity of the problem but not had access to the tools to begin planning for adaptation.
    The possibility that adaptation can inform political as well as managerial and technical discourses and structures is presented in Figure 2.1 as a distinction between resilience, transition and transformation. Resilience (see Chapter 3 ) refers to a refinement of actions to improve performance without changing guiding assumptions or the questioning of established routines. This could include the application of resilient building practices or application of new seed varieties. Transition (see Chapter 4 ) refers to incremental changes made through the assertion of pre-existing unclaimed rights. This might include a citizens’ group
     
     
    Figure 2.1
Adaptation intervenes in the coproduction of risk and development
     
    claiming rights under existing legislation to lobby against a development that would undermine ecological integrity and local adaptive capacity. Transition implies a reflection on development goals and how problems are framed (priorities, include new aspects, change boundaries of system analysis) and assumptions of how goals can be achieved. Transformation (see Chapter 5 ) refers to irreversible regime change. It builds on the recognition that paradigms and structural constraints impede widespread and deep social reform; for example, in international trade regimes or the individual values that are constitutive of global and local production and consumption systems. Where adaptation is