Evolutionary Resilience and Strategies for Climate Adaptation

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a framework by drawing on three broad perspectives on resilience, engineering, ecological and evolutionary, and to use this framework to critically examine the approach adopted by the draft London climate change adaptation strategy. The central argument of the study is that the Strategy's emergency planning-centred approach to climate adaptation veers between a standard ecological understanding of resilience and the more rigid engineering model. Its emphasis is on identifying ‘exposure’ and ‘vulnerability’ to risk from climate events and on bouncing back from the consequences of such exposures to a normal state, rather than on the dynamic process of transformation to a more desirable trajectory. The study concludes that fostering resilience involves planning for not only recovery from shocks but also cultivating preparedness, and seeking potential transformative opportunities which emerge from change.

Keywords:

• resilience
• climate adaptation
• London
• strategy

Notes

¹ The ARCADIA Project, July 2009–June 2012 has been supported by the EPSRC award number EP/G060983/1. Task 1 of the project explores Climate Change Adaptation governance using London as a fitting case study ‘due both to its climate vulnerability and to the relatively advanced stage of its adaptation planning in the UK context’ (Davoudi et al., 2010, p. 4).

² Peterson (2000, p. 328) defines scale as ‘the resolution and extent of the spatial and temporal frequencies of […] the structures and processes’, which in interaction with each other lead to the emergence of ‘ecological organisation’.

³ Panarchy, named for Pan, the Greek god of nature, refers to ‘how variables at different scales interact to control the dynamics and trajectories of change in ecological and socio-ecological systems‘ (Gunderson, 2009, p. 4).

⁴ The Mayor also has to prepare a Climate Change Mitigation and Energy Strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in London (GLA, 2010b).

⁵ The Draft adaptation strategy analyzed in this article has since been superseded by a final version published in October 2011 (GLA, 2011). Some of the suggestions in this study (included in an online working paper published as part of the dissemination for the ARCADIA project—Davoudi et al., 2010) are addressed in the final strategy. But many of the points raised in this paper remain pertinent.

⁶ The LDA was reduced, in 2010, to one third of its former staff and was abolished on 31st March 2012, with its functions absorbed into the GLA.

⁷ The dedicated GLA website for the consultation notes 7000 responses, but only a few dozen are made available for each ‘risk’ theme and prominent in the top-rated string are a dozen or so denying the existence or human origin of climate change (GLA, 2010c).