CC Adaptation Framework: ReminderComplex Systems

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CC Adaptation Framework Reminder--Complex
Systems

• A complex system, wrote NASA Goddard Institute
  climatologist David Rind in 1999, is literally
  one in which there are multiple interactions
  between many different components.

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CC Adaptation Reminder--Complex Systems

• Complex systems contain many constituents
  interacting nonlinearly.
• The constituents are interdependent.
• A complex system possesses a structure spanning
  several scales, each of which has a structure.
• A complex system is capable of emerging behavior
  at a particular scale leading to
  self-organization that changes the structure at
  that scale.
• Complexity involves interplay between chaos and
  non-chaos.
• Complexity involves interplay between cooperation
  and competition.
• --Michael Baranger MIT

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CC Adaptation Reminder--Complex Systems

• Local processes may govern transitions of the
  state of the whole system due to dependence on
  the initial conditions or what is known
  intuitively as the butterfly effect.
• Due to their non-linearity, the effects of these
  interacting processes across scales, including
  positive and negative feedbacks, are inherently
  unpredictable.

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Complex Adaptive Systems

• The essence of complex adaptive systems is that
  agents, in this case, human beings, act upon and
  are affected by the systems and its complex
  feedbacks and transitions, and can adapt to these
  changes, including inducing further changes by
  design.
• The consequence of such complexity in human
  worlds is that history mattersreally matters
  because historical problems resulting from the
  co-evolution of complex human systems with
  climate and each other have memory and cannot be
  simply undone.

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Climate Change Is Not Alone

• Rischard, High Noon, 2002, p. 66
• 20 Global Issues to
• Solve in 20 Years
• Global Commons (Sharing the Planet)
• Global Warming
• Biodiversity and Ecosystem Losses
• Fisheries Depletion
• Deforestation
• Water deficits
• Maritime safety and pollution
• Global Commitments (shared humanity)
• Massive step-up in fight against poverty
• Peacekeeping, conflict prevention, combating
  terrorism
• Education for all

Climate Change shares the stage with many other
competing global problems and is interrelated
(inter-linked, as UNEP and Global Environment
Facility put it) with many of them.
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Source United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Climate Change Impacts,
Vulnerabilities and Adaptation in Developing
Countries, Bonn, 2007, p. 9
BINARY THINKING
ADAPTIVE RESPONSE
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Source United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Climate Change Impacts,
Vulnerabilities and Adaptation in Developing
Countries, Bonn, 2007, p. 9
ADAPTIVE RESPONSE
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GEF Common Problems, Solution Synergies?

• Source Scientific and Advisory Panel, a
  Conceptual Design Tool for Exploiting
  Interlinkages between the Focal Areas of the GEF,
  Global Environment Facility, GEF/C.24/Inf.10
  November 10, 2004

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Escape from Complexity-GEF Stovepiping

• Source Scientific and Advisory Panel, a
  Conceptual Design Tool for Exploiting
  Interlinkages between the Focal Areas of the GEF,
  Global Environment Facility, GEF/C.24/Inf.10
  November 10, 2004

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Shift to Integrated Mitigation and Adaptation

• Vulnerability 1 to biophysical impacts

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Vulnerability 1 Breaks down in developing
countries
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V2 Social Risk Assessment Matrix of climate
trends, associated hazards and vulnerability
factors
Social Risk Assessment
Source Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate
change and human vulnerability Mapping emerging
trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian actors,
Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report
to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs with CARE, March 2008, at
http//www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionP
aperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
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Climate Hotspots
Source Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate
change and human vulnerability Mapping emerging
trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian actors,
Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report
to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs with CARE, March 2008, at
http//www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionP
aperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
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Combined Social Vulnerability

• Source Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate
  change and human vulnerability Mapping emerging
  trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian actors,
  Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report
  to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
  Affairs with CARE, March 2008, at
  http//www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionP
  aperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf

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Overlay of Climate Hotspots

• Source Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate
  change and human vulnerability Mapping emerging
  trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian actors,
  Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report
  to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
  Affairs with CARE, March 2008, at
  http//www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionP
  aperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf

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Down scale Urban CC Vulnerability

• Overall
• Delhi, India has the highest average risk score,
  followed by Dhaka, Bangladesh.
• The next two cities are Ho Chi Minh City in
  Vietnam and Dongguan, China.
• Delhis average score is 3, suggesting that for
  some of the risk impacts, its risk is low
  compared to the other cities.
• Number two and three cities have no risk impact
  for which they have the highest risk (a score of
  5).
• Most of the cities have an average score below 2.
  ie relatively low exposure on average
• But, some of these cities, such as Jaipur, India,
  and Handan, China, have the highest score on at
  least one risk impact.
• It is difficult to say which city is at greatest
  risk.
• On average, Delhi scores highest and Bandung,
  Indonesia the lowest.
• But, the rankings differ quite considerably based
  on which risk impact is considered.
• Caveats
• The table also presents average scores across all
  the risk impacts, applying no weighting of
  individual factors.
• Note that application of a cardinal scoring
  system, in our case applying scores of 0 to 5, as
  well as no weighting, can introduce distortions.
  A city with a score of 5 does not necessarily
  have five times the risk of a city with a score
  of 1.
• Not all of the risk impacts will equally affect
  people.
• It does not consider how much a city would suffer
  from climate impacts, nor the past, current, or
  future adaptive capacity of a city to respond to
  impacts.
•  

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Types of Adaptation

• Routine coping
• Autonomous adaptation
• Reactive vs proactive adaptation
• Anticipatory, planned, adaptation
• Incremental adaptation

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Adaptation Costs

• No-one has a good estimate of the incremental
  cost of adaptation, due to inherent uncertainty
  because
• the range of climate scenarios and related
  impacts and adaptive costs is great
• current cost estimates (often in the range of
  10-50 billion /year) do not account for
  autonomous adaptation (which would reduce the
  cost), nor for disruptive mitigative and adaptive
  technologies (that may further greatly reduce the
  cost).
• Conversely, these costs do not account for the
  upgrade of basic infrastructure such as housing
  that may be necessary for adaptation in poor
  parts of the world nor for possible very high
  costs arising from dangerous climate change.
• Existing estimates have a high range that do not
  provide the basis for consensus and no consensus
  exists as to the computational basis for burden
  sharing, or even who should be sharing the costs
  of adaptation

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MITIGATION-ADAPTATION SYNERGIES MITIGATION AND
ADAPTATION DIFFER
Table 1 Characteristics of mitigation and
adaptation
Source Bosello et al, 2007, cited in D.
Satterthwaite et al, Building Climate Change
Resilience in Urban Areas and among Urban
Populations in Low- and Middle-income Nations,
prepared for the Rockefeller Foundations Global
Urban Summit, Innovations for an Urban World, in
Bellagio in July 2007 and published as Adapting
to Climate Change in Urban Areas The
possibilities and constraints in low- and
middle-income nations, Human Settlements
Discussion Paper Series, online at
http//www.iied.org/HS/topics/accc.html, p. 51
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Adaptation-Mitigation LinkagesSource R. Klein,
S. Huq et al, Inter-relationships between
adaptation and mitigation, chapter 18, 2007.
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Barriers to Integration

• The IPCC authors called for more research to
  explore whether bridges can be built between the
  two categories of activity. The barriers should
  not be under-estimated.
• At RMIT University, for example, an effort by a
  water pollution chemist to engage with building
  design specialists on whether water-storing
  structures could be built into walls and
  contribute to distributed water supply (adaptive
  measure), reduction in flammability, and to
  provide thermal mass (mitigation) in the building
  met with a cool response.
• As the chemist put it, the people there were
  primarily scientific and into gadgets rather than
  structures...

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Conclusion

• Everything changes all that varies is the rate
  of change, ranging from infinitesimal to
  incremental to very fast to abrupt. From a
  normative viewpoint, what is acceptable change or
  stable to one person or social entity is
  overwhelming and objectionable to another.
  Resistance to change could be adaptive or
  maladaptive.
• James Rosenau