IPCC_Managing Risks of Extreme Events.pdf - Climate Access

Chapter 1Climate Change: New Dimensions in Disaster Risk, Exposure, Vulnerability, and Resilienceimpede progress at each. Barriers to understanding, for instance, caninclude difficulty recognizing a changing signal due to difficulty with itsdetection, perception, and appreciation; preoccupation with otherpressing concerns that divert attention from the growing signal; andlack of administrative and social support for making adaptive decisions.While this study offers a diagnostic framework and avoids prescriptionsabout overcoming adaptation barriers, other studies, such as thosementioned above, offer more focused prescriptions relevant to particularsectors and contexts.Research on barriers has generally focused on adaptation as a process,recognizing the difficulty in furnishing a universally acceptable a prioridefinition of successful adaptation outcomes (Adger et al., 2005). Thisskirts potentially important normative questions, however, and someresearchers have considered whether particular activities should beconsidered maladaptive, defined as an “action taken ostensibly to avoidor reduce vulnerability to climate change that impacts adversely on,or increases the vulnerability of other systems, sectors, or socialgroups” (Barnett and O’Neill, 2009, p. 211). They identify activitiesthat increase greenhouse gas releases, burden vulnerable populationsdisproportionately, and require excessive commitment to one path ofaction (Barnett and O’Neill, 2009). Other candidates include actions thatoffset one set of risks but increase others, resulting in net risk increase,for example, a dam that reduces flooding but increases the threat ofzoonotic diseases, and actions that amplify risk to those who remainexposed (or are newly exposed as a result of a maladaptive action), ofwhich there are abundant examples in the public health literature(Sterman, 2006) and other fields.These issues have a long history in disaster risk management. For instance,in 1942, deriving from study and work in the 1930s, Gilbert White assertedthat levees can provide a false sense of security and are eventuallyfallible, ultimately leading to increased risk, and advocated, amongother ‘adjustment’ measures, land use planning and environmentalmanagement schemes in river basins in order to face up to floodinghazards (see Burton et al., 1978). Such findings are among the earlyadvances in the field of ‘human adjustment to hazards,’ which derivedfrom an ecological approach to human-environmental relationships. Inthe case of levees for example, the distinction between adaptive andmaladaptive actions depends on the time period over which risks arebeing assessed. From a probabilistic perspective, the overall likelihoodof a catastrophic flood overwhelming a levee’s protective capacity is afunction of time. The wrinkle that climate change introduces is thatmany climate-related hazards may become more frequent, shrinking thetimescale over which certain decisions can be considered ‘adaptive’ andcommunities can consider themselves ‘adapted’ (Nelson et al., 2007).While frameworks that help diagnose barriers to adaptation are helpfulin identifying the origin of maladaptive decisions, crafting truly adaptivepolicies is still difficult even when the barriers are fully exposed. Forinstance, risk displacement is a common concern in large insurancesystems when risk is not continuously reassessed, risk managementstrategies and mechanisms for distributing risk across populations (suchas risk pricing in insurance schemes) are inadequately maintained, or ifnew risk management strategies are not recruited as necessary. Thiswas the case with the levees in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina,wherein the levees were built to make a hazardous area safer butparadoxically facilitated the exposure of a much larger population to alarge hazard. As a result of multiple factors (Burby, 2006), inadequatelevee infrastructure increased the likelihood of flooding but no otheradequate risk reduction and management measures were implemented,resulting in catastrophic loss of life and property when the city was hitwith the surge from a strong Category 3 storm (Comfort, 2006). Some havesuggested that, as a result of the U.S. federal government’s historicalapproach to disasters, those whose property was at risk in New Orleansanticipated that they would receive federal recovery funds in the event ofa flooding disaster. This, in turn, may have distorted the risk managementlandscape, resulting in improper pricing of flooding risks, decreasedincentives to take proper risk management actions, and exposure of alarger population to flood risk than might otherwise have been the case(Kunreuther, 2006).This example illustrates how an adaptation barrier may have resulted inan ultimately maladaptive risk management regime, and demonstratesthe importance of considering how risk, in practice, is assumed andshared. One goal of risk sharing is to properly price risk so that, in theevent risk is realized, there is an adequate pool of capital available tofund recovery. When risk is improperly priced and risk sharing is notadequately regulated, as can occur when risk-sharing devices are notmonitored appropriately, an adequate pool of reserves may notaccumulate. When risk is realized, the responsibility for funding therecovery falls to the insurer of last resort, often the public.The example also illustrates how an insurance system designed tomotivate adaptation (by individual homeowners or flood protectionagencies) can function properly only if technical rates – rates that properlyreflect empirically determined levels of risk – can be established andmatched with various levels of risk at a relatively high level of spatialand temporal resolution. Even in countries with free-market floodinsurance systems, insurers may be reluctant to charge the full technicalrate because consumers have come to assume that insurance costsshould be relatively consistent in a given location. Without chargingtechnical rates, however, it is difficult to use pricing to motivate adaptationstrategies such as flood proofing or elevating the ground floor of a newdevelopment (Lamond et al., 2009), restricting where properties can bebuilt, or justifying the construction of communal flood defenses. In sucha case, barriers to adaptation (in both planning and management, inthis case) can result in a strategy with maladaptive consequences in thepresent. In places where risk levels are rising due to climate changeunder prevailing negative conditions of exposure and vulnerability,reconsideration of these barriers – a process that includes double- andtriple-loop learning – could promote more adaptive risk management.Otherwise, maladaptive risk management decisions may commit collectiveresources (public or private) to coping and recovery rather than successfuladaptation and may force some segments of society to cope withdisproportionate levels of risk.55