Twenty-eighth Report Adapting Institutions to Climate Change Cm ...

INTRODUCTION
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
Chapter 4
ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE:
DEVELOPING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES
Chapters 2 and 3 highlighted the effects that climate change will have on the exemplars we chose
and some of the implications of these changes for the relevant institutions. This chapter aims to
assist all institutions in building adaptive capacityi,1 in order to cope with climate change.
We identify four overlapping challenges. These are uncertainty, complexity, path dependency, and
equity and efficiency – described in detail below. In confronting these challenges, organisations
will have to pay particular attention to how they frame the issue of adaptation, how they learn
and how they implement policy responses. In performing these tasks of framing, learning and
implementation against the background of the four challenges, we have identified a number of
key elements which need to be considered. These will be discussed later in this chapter and many
lead to the recommendations in Chapter 5 directed primarily at governments.
Adaptation to climate change is one example of the problems that institutions face in responding
to change and risk. The effects of climate change are pervasive; they will be felt at different times
and across a broad range of activities. But as with mitigation, the challenges presented by the need
to adapt to climate change are also an opportunity for society to be proactive and to exploit the
possibilities of achieving multiple benefits.
As discussed in Chapter 3, institutions addressing adaptation include both organisations and
institutional arrangements. What follows is more immediately applicable to organisations that
have the capacity to formulate and implement programmes and policies. However, other types
of institution do not exist in a vacuum; for these, the discussion below will relate to the bodies
responsible for their administration, or to wider society in the case of behavioural patterns.
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION?
4.5
The Commission has identified four challenges that institutions will face when adapting to
climate change:
planning in situations of uncertainty;
coping with complexity;
the problem of inbuilt path dependency; and
the need to deliver both equity and efficiency.
These are intensely inter-related, not discrete challenges.
i ‘Adaptive capacity’ is defined here as the ability or potential of a system to respond successfully to climate variability
and change.
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