The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change

The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change

Article Type: Books and resources From: International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Volume 1, Issue 3

Edited by Lisa, E., Schipper, F., and Burton, I.,Earthscan,London, 2009,US$103.00,480 pp.,ISBN 978-1-84407-530-0 (hardback); 978-1-84407-531-7 (paperback)

Even if mitigation solutions are successful in reaching a “reasonable” stabilization goal that is capable of preventing global temperature rise beyond a certain threshold, adaptation to climate change will still be necessary. With world population expected to increase by three billion by 2050, mostly in developing countries, we will be increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather events. In the words of Yale economist William Nordhaus, “mitigate we might; adapt we must.”

The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change (The Reader) presents a collection of seminal papers on adaptation from the last two decades. Divided into five sections covering theory, vulnerability and resilience, disaster risk, development, and climate change policy, The Reader acts as an excellent reference for scholars, NGOs and policymakers alike.

Any treatise on adaptation to climate change will inevitably be compared to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which devoted one of three working groups to the topic of “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.” Chapters included food, water, human health, and impact assessments for separate geographic regions. The Reader overlaps in part with the IPCC in its coverage of vulnerability and disaster risk, but does not try to match its scope. Rather, it goes beyond the IPCC in explaining the theory of adaptation, and discussing implications for policy. In the second chapter, Ian Burton points out that the word “adaptation” was used only five times in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreement. The Reader emphasizes that mitigation solutions may not be enough to “stem the tide” of climate change, and that climate policy must incorporate adaptation to reflect this reality.

The field of climate change is progressing so rapidly that any published material will inevitably face difficulty in remaining current. Though recent scientific developments do not alter the main conclusions presented in The Reader, contributions which reference the first two IPCC reports (1990 and 1995) should be updated. For instance, The Reader states that uncertainties in the climate model projections of future tropical cyclone activity are too large to plan for in terms of adaptation, mitigation, and policy. While true to some degree, the developing consensus among the scientific community is that the intensity (and resultant economic damage) of tropical cyclones is likely to increase, though frequency and spatial distributions remain uncertain.

In the final chapter, the potential economic costs of adaptation to climate change are estimated in a report by the UNFCCC. Possible benefits deriving from an improved resilience to climate change are explicitly omitted in the analysis. It is striking that the losses due to the migration of millions of people, and the associated development of new technology and infrastructure, are also explicitly omitted. But herein lies the success of The Reader. Not only does it give a comprehensive overview of adaptation to climate change, but it also points towards new grounds for future endeavor, both in terms of research on adaptation and prospects for climate policy.

Ian LloydProgram in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA