Autonomous Processes of Adaptation

Autonomous processes of adaptation encompass the courses of action individuals, households, businesses and communities take in response to the opportunities, constraints and risks they face within livelihood systems. This includes actions taken that reduce vulnerability to risks and natural hazards, including climate variability. Our approach seeks to identify the factors that enable and constrain individuals, households, businesses and communities in effectively responding to the risks and opportunities associated with natural hazards including those emerging as climatic conditions change.  By focusing on responses to opportunities, constraints and risks, we seek to identify points of entry where carefully targeted support or other interventions can enhance existing or catalyze new adaptive responses. This approach represents our core approach to building adaptive capacities. Using this approach as a foundation, we are working to enhance the capabilities of individuals, households, and businesses throughout South Asia to adapt to climate variability and reduce their vulnerability to disaster risks.

The strategies employed by individuals and households are different from planned adaptation processes. They involve either proactive or reactive decision-making on the part of individuals, households and other entities regarding the courses of action to take in response to the combination of opportunities, constraints and risks they perceive within livelihood systems. For example, a farmer in India might rely on multiple strategies to reduce his or her vulnerability to the failure or reduction in monsoon precipitation. Such strategies could include planting a variety of drought resistant crops, diversifying their livelihood to include other types of income generation beyond agriculture, or completely forgoing planting and seasonally migrating to an urban center to find employment. Likewise, some communities faced with inundation by rising sea levels and land erosion have spontaneously relocated to higher ground or further inland, such as the village of  El Choncho in Columbia (Correa and Gonzalez, 2000). Some businesses develop disaster risk reduction plans to cope with a variety of disasters.

Individuals and households often undertake adaptive measures in response to pulsed changes. Pulsed changes are specific events, such as storm surges or hurricanes, as opposed to incremental changes such as gradual sea level rise. Pulsed events are recurring, but much uncertainty surrounds the frequency and intensity of such events. If individuals and households are aware that the area in which they live is particularly vulnerable to a particular event, such recurrent droughts, they will take action to reduce risk. Furthermore, individuals and households are more likely to change their behaviors and take pro-active adaptive measures after experiencing a pulsed event. The range of adaptive strategies an individual or household has is dependent upon social, political, and economic status. The poor are constrained by lack of resources and often find that their only adaptive strategy is to reduce vulnerability by migrating to another location. Migration is likely to be accompanied by livelihood changes as people either take advantage of opportunities in other areas or are forced to rely on whatever source of work they can find elsewhere. Hurricane Katrina witnessed one of the largest internal migrations within the United States in response to a pulsed event. For some, migration is not an option and they must engage in livelihood diversification to reduce vulnerability.

However, individual and households responses have the potential to be maladaptive, especially if they are in response to perceived risk reduction because of planned adaptive measures. Autonomous adaptive measures are maladaptive if they increase, rather than reduce, risk. Some examples of maladaptive measures taken by individuals and households include settlement in floodplains. Farming communities in India have found their fields repeatedly flooded by the embankments designed to protect their villages. Hurricane Katrina exposed the true vulnerability of households that were constructed in low-lying areas of Orleans Parish that were “protected” by levies. The challenge of planned adaptive measures is that when the limitations of such measures and the underlying policy and behavioral assumptions are not acknowledged, risky, maladaptive behaviors are encouraged because individuals and households perceive their vulnerability to be reduced.

We believe that autonomous processes of adaptation are likely to play a larger role in responding to climate change than planned adaptation strategies implemented by national governments or other high level entities. Individuals, households, businesses and communities have much more intimate contact with the mix of constraints, opportunities and risks emerging within local contexts than governments. Facing local realities, they react and adapt. While elements of the larger context can be shaped by governments, planned adaptation strategies are often unable to respond to the inherent variations in local conditions. The success of such individual adaptive measures is, however, situated within the interactions of local and global markets, governance, resource management, and climate variability and change. The rules shaping this larger arena represent a prime point of entry where actions by governments and global entities can shape and direct the directions autonomous adaptive responses take and to avoid maladaptation. What are some of these points of entry? Prior research under the Adaptive Strategies Project indicates that the actions households in South Asia take to protect themselves during flood and drought events depends strongly on several factors:

1. The ability of information, goods and services to flow into and out of affected areas;
2. Existing patterns of vulnerability created by gender, income and social position;
3. The nature of livelihood systems within a region; specifically, the extent to which individuals and households have the climatic and other information necessary to diversify income strategies and incorporate non-farm components which tend to be less vulnerable to flood and drought than agriculture;
4. The ability of people to migrate or commute in order to obtain access to non-farm or agricultural sources of income;
5. The social capital and institutional checks and balances that households have access to including education, community institutions such as self-help groups, formal institutions such as government departments and banks, NGOs, the media and social networks;
6. The nature of physical infrastructure (communication and early warning systems, roads, houses, water supply systems, etc.), in particular:
   
   1. the degree to which such infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption by floods and droughts;
   2. the role the infrastructure plays in early warning; and
   3. how such infrastructure promotes the maintenance of livelihoods during droughts and floods by enabling communication, serving as a point of refuge, helping to protect assets, and facilitating  the movement of goods, services and people;
7. The ability of households in regions to obtain secure sources of water for domestic uses, whether from local or trans-boundary sources, water markets or rural supply schemes; and
8. Natural resource conditions, particularly the degree to which ground and surface water systems have been disrupted.

The ability of populations to adapt to floods, droughts and climatic variability is heavily influenced by the degree to which information, finances, goods, services and people can move across local and national borders. Our approaches to supporting and enhancing autonomous adaptive processes involve several strategies. First, we are investigating how climate information from global and national sources can be structured and, where appropriate, integrated with local sources of information to increase accessibility and use in disaster risk reduction and post-disaster recovery processes, and adaptation to climate variability and change. Second, we are studying how to manage knowledge on local coping strategies, changing dimensions of vulnerability, with particular attention to gender, and other key issues. Third, we are working to address key issues such as the role of migration, remittances, formal and informal insurance, communication systems for early warning and the governance of risk reduction. Fourth, we are examining mechanisms to enhance the flows of information, finances, goods and services to communities on up to national levels.

References

Correa, I. D. and J. L. Gonzalez (2000), Coastal erosion and village relocation: a Colombian case study, Ocean and Coastal Management 43: 51-64.