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Vulnerability and Adaptation

Understanding how to cope with the impacts of climate change

As the impacts of climate change become more noticeable, international, national and local awareness of the need to prepare for, and respond to, the impacts of climate change has grown. Although human societies have always dealt with climatic variations and fluctuations, climate change poses new challenges due to the expected pace of change and the pervasiveness of projected impacts. The ability of communities to respond to these impacts will depend upon their ability to access the economic resources, technology, information, skills and infrastructure appropriate to their specific context. It will also require an enabling environment facilitated by suitable policies and programs at the national level.

While all countries will be affected by climate change, developing countries, particularly the least developed countries, are expected to be among those most heavily impacted. Limited financial, institutional and human resources, high dependency on ecosystem-dependent economic and livelihood activities (e.g., agriculture), and existing stressors such as HIV/AIDS leave the poor most vulnerable and least able to adapt to projected impacts. Climate change will make it even more difficult for developing countries to break out of poverty and achieve their sustainable development objectives. (These ideas are explored further in the accompanying backgrounder on vulnerability and adaptation (PDF - 124 kb) in developing countries.)

IISD works within Canada and internationally to increase understanding of effective responds to the complex socio-economic and environmental impacts of climate change; to develop tools and processes to facilitate these responses; and to encourage integration of adaptation considerations into routine decision-making.

Contents

• Fostering Adaptation in Eastern and Southern Africa
  Recognizing the high vulnerability of African countries to the impacts of climate change, the African Centre for Technology Studies and the International Institute for Sustainable Development are co-executing a four-year project in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. The goal of this project is to reduce the vulnerability of communities in Kenya, Mozambique and Rwanda to the impacts of climate change, thereby improving their well-being and protecting their livelihoods.

• CRiSTAL Project Management Tool
  The project management tool CRiSTAL (Community-based Risk Screening Tool – Adaptation & Livelihoods) enables project planners and managers to: (i) assess an intervention's impact on local capacity to cope with climate stress; and (ii) think about how to adjust project activities so that at the very least they don't undermine local coping capacity and, where possible, further enhance coping capacity. IISD is working to share this tool with project managers, communities and policy-makers in developing and developed countries.

• Early Lessons from Implementation of Climate Change Adaptation Projects in South-Eastern Africa
  In April 2007, IISD and SouthSouthNorth co-hosted a regional workshop in Maputo, Mozambique, that brought together over 50 project managers and policy-makers from southern and eastern Africa to share their experiences with and plans for implementing projects that seek to reduce the vulnerability of communities to the impacts of climate change.

• Lake Balaton Regional Vulnerability Assessment
  Hungary's Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, is undergoing ecological and socio-systems vulnerability arising from multiple forces of change, including climate change. Undertaken through IISD's Measurement and Assessment program, this project contributes to resilience by combining integrated vulnerability assessment with the development of multi-scale adaptation strategies.

• Adaptive Policy-making
  Designing policies in a world of uncertainty, change and surprise is a challenge facing policy-makers in all sectors. The specific objective of this multi-year project (2005–2009) is to advance understanding of adaptive policies and help agriculture and water resource policy-makers at the local, state and federal levels to design adaptive policies—policies that can adapt to anticipated and unanticipated conditions.

• Building Resilience on the Prairies
  The Canadian prairies provide a dynamic background against which to examine the resilience of communities to past climate stresses as a means of strengthening adaptation to future climate change. By examining successful examples of how agro-ecosystems have adapted to past climate stress, IISD and its partners believe that we can learn how to promote adaptive capacity and build the resilience of prairie agro-ecosystems to present climate change.

• Development and Adaptation Days
  Since its inception in 2002, this annual conference has evolved to become a respected and anticipated part of the international climate change process. IISD is pleased to partner with the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Stockholm Environment Institute in the continued delivery of this important and influential event.

• Inuit Observations of Climate Change
  In 1999, IISD, the Community of Sachs Harbour and other partners initiated a year-long project to document Arctic climate change and communicate our findings to Canadian and international audiences. The continued interest in the outputs of this project is a testament to the power of the messages conveyed by the people of Sachs Harbour as they experience some of the first impacts of climate change.

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