[ad_1]
Communities at the forefront of climate change want to be the ones who choose their own adaptive strategies.
According to a WSU paper, whether or not humanity rises up to the challenges of a warming world may depend on it. Nature Climate Change.
Anne Pisor (assistant professor of anthropology) and an international team if researchers propose a bottom-up approach for climate change adaptation in which communities on the frontlines are involved in the decision-making process.
“Currently most governments and other organizations involved in addressing climate change prefer to fund initiatives where decisions are made about what to do at a higher level and then these decisions are passed down to local communities, like towns or neighborhoods, to implement,” Pisor said. “The issue with this is that what seems like a good strategy to these organizations may not actually work on the ground.”
Instead, the authors argue that communities — which are often rural, Indigenous, and/or poor — should be enabled to choose their own responses to climate change because they have often been doing it for a long time.
Per co-author Kristina Douglass’s work in Southwest Madagascar for example, mobility, social connections, and diversified methods of food production were key to responding to climate change over the last 2000 years. These strategies are reflected by oral histories, archaeological data, and satellite data which show patterns of past settlement.
Tlingit communities from Alaska and Western Canada have long used their own adaptations in response to sea level rising, rapid movements of glaciers, and ice-dam floods. Tlingit leaders today highlight the relevance of these adaptations in a changing climate.
“Some folks make the argument that when given a climate emergency, we have to reinvent the wheel,” Pisor said. “We’re making the argument that that’s a little hasty. While we understand that time is limited, local communities have been managing climate risk for a long time. So, what we would really like to see are people in governments and other organizations including communities in decision-making more.”
The authors highlight that solutions that are quick to implement, maximize benefits, and minimize costs are often used to address the climate crisis.
These approaches may not be easy to adopt or maintained over time by members of the community. If this happens, both the speed and financial efficiency of these approaches are lost.
Instead, researchers and organizations must support communities in developing or adopting potential solutions and then testing them out, adapting as necessary. Communities can always try another solution if one is not right for them.
One important point made in the paper is that organizations can support communities by reducing constraints that keep them from experimenting with potential solutions – like rules and bureaucracy – and perhaps returning rights to land or to resources.
Organizations can also provide “insurance” to communities so they can experiment with solutions without bearing the brunt of failure. Communities can take part in risk pooling where they put money in and receive funds back if the adaptation fails due to a climate change. A universal basic income, which can buffer risk and encourage experimentation, might also be an option.
The study authors conclude that community members should choose the adaptations they want to fund. Taken together, these steps can increase the effectiveness of climate change adaptations — how good they are at reducing risk and how long they last – as well as equity in who gets to decide how communities respond.
“Climate change remains perhaps the longest term and highest stakes crisis we’re facing,” Pisor said. “The message of the recently released IPPC report is hurry up: we really need to fix this now. But that sense of urgency shouldn’t come at the expense of community voices and community involvement because solutions will not stick if the people who have to implement them are not involved.”
