![]() This could be in how cities are structured and operate, for example, or where farms are located and the types of crops that they grow. While adaptation entails preserving existing structures and ways of being, transformation is often associated with large-scale, profound and deep-rooted changes. If the adaptative action is not adequate to overcome the disaster risk, societies will need to transform. This is sometimes described as incremental adaptation, where solutions are centred on technological and managerial fixes that are responsive to a particular event or have a preventative effect. However, when societies exceed their ability to cope, they should be able to adapt to the adverse changes they face. ![]() By this definition, coping is the first and ideal strategy for managing risk. Resilience capacity is described as a combination of: (i) shock absorbing and coping (ii) evolving and adapting and (iii) transforming. Resilience is a combination of coping, adaptive and transformative capacitiesĪdaptation is sometimes seen as being part of resilience. This is an area where, considering the potential failure or breach of flood defences in the face of increasing flood risks, it is crucial to maintain a holistic and diverse range of solutions. Building large-scale flood barriers, for example, is a flooding adaptation measure that often creates a false sense of security and as a result leads to a decrease in other flood risk-reduction and resilience activities. Increasing adaptability to a particular range of shocks may also decrease general resilience to new or as-yet unknown shocks. ![]() For example, farmers who have invested in large-scale irrigation infrastructure may be reluctant to abandon it, even if that irrigation infrastructure becomes less efficient or sustainable as rainfall becomes less reliable. This is a result of the ‘ sunk-cost effect ’, the phenomenon by which past investments are afforded more weight in decision-making processes than future opportunities, challenging rational choice. Implementing large-scale and costly adaptation projects may, for example, lead to a reduction in ‘response diversity’ – the number of available options for responding effectively to a disaster or adverse climate impact. Taking action on adaptation has implications for resilience: in many cases it increases resilience but there is evidence it can also be undermining. ![]() Adaptation can build or undermine resilience As such, building climate resilience requires a holistic and multi-dimensional approach to enhance communities’ social, human, natural, physical and financial capacities to cope with and recover from the impacts of climate change. This entails a range of actions across policy, infrastructure, services, planning, education and communication. On the other hand, resilience to climate change is defined as the capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the impacts of hazardous climatic events while incurring minimal damage to societal wellbeing, the economy and the environment. More rarely, adaptation may seek to take advantage of opportunities that climate change could bring, such as making new crop choices suited to the changed climate. Such measures could include building sea walls to protect people against sea level rise, installing new irrigation systems to combat water scarcity, or planting trees to reduce air pollution and cool urban areas. Discussions on adaptation often advocate taking specific urgent actions before it is no longer reasonably possible to adapt to, minimise, or avoid harm from climate change. In the context of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines adaptation as the process taken to “ adjust to the actual or expected climate and its effects ”. However, in practice, the distinctions and relationships between resilience and adaptation are more complicated and less easily defined. At its most basic, adaptation refers to a process or action that changes a living thing so that it is better able to survive in a new environment, whereas resilience describes the capacity or ability to anticipate and cope with shocks, and to recover from their impacts in a timely and efficient manner. ‘Adaptation’ and ‘resilience’ are often used interchangeably in policy and academic discourse, and while they are complementary concepts, there are important differences in these terms.
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