scholarly journals Victims of "adaptation": climate change, sacred mountains, and perverse resilience

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 704
Author(s):  
Adam Dunstan

<p>Resiliency and adaptation are increasingly prevalent in climate change policy as well as scholarship, yet scholars have brought forward several critiques of these concepts along analytical as well as political lines. Pressing questions include: who resiliency is for, what it takes to maintain it, and the scale at which it takes place. The concept of "perverse resilience", for example, proposes that resiliency for one sub-system may threaten the well-being of the overall system. In this article, I propose the related concept of "perverse adaptation", where one actor or institution's adaptation to climate change in fact produces aftershocks and secondary impacts upon other groups. Drawing on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research in northern Arizona regarding artificial snowmaking at a ski resort on a sacred mountain, I elucidate resort supporters' and others' attempts to frame snowmaking as a sustainable adaptation to drought (and, implicitly, climate change). I counterpoise these framings with narratives from local activists as well as Diné (Navajo) individuals regarding the significant impacts of snowmaking on water supply and quality, sacred lands and ceremony, public health, and, ironically, carbon emissions. In so doing, I argue that we must interrogate resilience policies for their unexpected "victims of adaptation."</p><p><strong>Key words: </strong>climate change policy, adaptation, perverse resilience, sacred sites, Diné (Navajo)</p>

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix FitzRoy ◽  
Jennifer Franz-Vasdeki ◽  
Elissaios Papyrakis

Author(s):  
Karen Alvarenga Oliveira

This chapter examines the climate change policy of Brazil. In 2010 at the Sixteenth Conference of Parties in Cancún, Brazil announced its voluntary national target of significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 36.1 per cent and 38.9 per cent of projected emissions by 2020. These targets were defined in the Brazilian National Policy on Climate Change (PNMC). The PNMC establishes principles, guidelines, and economic instruments for reaching the national voluntary targets. It relies on sectoral plans for mitigation and adaptation to climate change in order to facilitate the move towards a low-carbon economy. The PNMC defined various aspects related to the measurement of goals, formulation of sectoral plans and of action plans for the prevention and control of deforestation in all Brazilian biomes, and governance structure.


Author(s):  
Gupta Joyeeta ◽  
Bosch Hilmer

This chapter describes the relationship between climate change and security. Successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have provided growing evidence of the impacts of climate change. Climate change can affect human well-being in terms of access to water, food, energy, and land, as well as in terms of risks to human health. Thus, climate change is seen as a driver of other socio-ecological problems worldwide. Climate change is also seen as a risk and threat multiplier, as it can exacerbate existing challenges faced by States, including poor governance institutions and poverty. However, climate change policy could potentially be a ‘threat minimizer’ if mitigation and adaptation measures are integrated into the development paradigm. Against this background, the chapter addresses the following issue: What is the nature of the security debate raised by the climate change issue and how is this being addressed within scholarly, policy, and legal fora? It looks at the different ways in which security has been defined in the literature and its diverse implications for law and policy.


Author(s):  
Tim Forsyth

Community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change is an approach to adaptation that aims to include vulnerable people in the design and implementation of adaptation measures. The most obvious forms of CBA include simple, but accessible, technologies such as storing freshwater during flooding or raising the level of houses near the sea. It can also include more complex forms of social and economic resilience such as increasing access to a wider range of livelihoods or reducing the vulnerability of social groups that are especially exposed to climate risks. CBA has been promoted by some development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies as a means of demonstrating the importance of participatory and deliberative methods within adaptation to climate change, and the role of longer-term development and social empowerment as ways of reducing vulnerability to climate change. Critics, however, have argued that focusing on “community” initiatives can often be romantic and can give the mistaken impression that communities are homogeneous when in fact they contain many inequalities and social exclusions. Accordingly, many analysts see CBA as an important, but insufficient, step toward the representation of vulnerable local people in climate change policy, but that it also offers useful lessons for a broader transformation to socially inclusive forms of climate change policy, and towards seeing resilience to climate change as lying within socio-economic organization rather than in infrastructure and technology alone.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Pashupati Nepal

Nepalese people have experienced climate variability for a long time and the mitigation and adaptation responses they have made to reduce the effect of climate variability are not new phenomena for Nepal. However, mainstreaming climate change issues into sectoral policies from the government can be seen as recent activities in Nepal. Nepal has contributed negligible amount of emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) of global greenhouse gas, it is the fourth most vulnerable country in the world. In this context, this paper aims to review climate change adaptation policies in terms of sectoral integration. This paper has adopted text-mining method for information retrieval and knowledge mining and followed step-by-step approach to undertake review of policies. It concludes that National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) in 2010 can be a milestone in sectoral adaptation of climate change issue largely because it has provided the national framework for sectoral adaptation to climate change. However, NAPA ignores the importance of structural and institutional reforms needed for mainstreaming climate change adaptation into sectoral agencies. Climate change Policy, 2011, Local Adaptation Plan of Action (LAPA) 2011, Constitution of Nepal, 2015, Local Government Operation Act (LGOA) 2017, Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act, 2017 and National REDD+ Strategy, 2018 are other prominent legislative and policy frameworks that have significant contribution in sectoral integration of climate change adaptation issues. However, lack of climate change act in order to implement fully these policies into practice for its implementation can be a major obstacle to achieve the goal. In this context, strong legislative foundation with effective institutional mechanism among different sectors will be very crucial to capture the spirit of new Federal Constitution of Nepal.


InterConf ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 315-321
Author(s):  
Ivaniuta Serhii

An assessment of the priorities of the new EU climate change policy until 2050 was made and on this basis the prospects of Ukraine's climate policy were analyzed taking into account the European Green Deal for adaptation to climate change in Ukraine.


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