Progress in Development Studies 10, 2 (2010) pp.

16168

Progress reports

Climate change adaptation and

development I: the state of the debate
Jessica Ayers
Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and
Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE

David Dodman
International Institute for Environment and Development,
3 Endsleigh Street, London, WC1H 0DD

I Introduction
There are clear linkages between climate
change and development. In the first place, climate change is a result of unsustainable socioeconomic development, which has driven the
emission of greenhouse gases that are causing
anthropogenic climate change (Cohen, 1998).
In turn, sustainable development can reduce
vulnerability to climate change, because vulnerability depends on factors linked to development, including access to economic, ecological,
social and human resources, and inadequate
institutions, governance and infrastructure
(Ayers and Huq 2009; Dodman et al., 2009;
Huq et al., 2006; Klein et al., 2007). Finally, the
impacts of climate change can impede development and threaten the efficacy and sustainability of development investments (Burton
and Van Aalst, 2004; Klein et al., 2007).

2010 SAGE Publications

Responses to climate change involve both

mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation here
refers to limiting the production of greenhouse
gases (GHGs), particularly carbon dioxide and
methane, to mitigate against further anthropogenic climate change. Wealthier and more
industrialised countries have historically played
the most important role in climate change
mitigation, but rapid economic and industrial
growth elsewhere (particularly in China,
India and Brazil) means that it is increasingly necessary for these countries also to be
involved.
Adaptation describes the adjustment in
natural or human systems in response to actual
or expected climatic stimuli or their effects,
which moderates harm or exploits beneficial
opportunities (IPCC, 2007). Adaptation can
be a process, action or outcome in a system

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Climate change adaptation and development I

(ecosystem, household, community, group,

sector, region, country) that helps the system
to better cope with, manage or adjust to the
changing conditions, stresses, hazards, risks
or opportunities associated with climate
change (Smit and Wandel, 2006). Although
the entire world will be affected by climate
change, adaptation is most necessary in lowand middle-income countries whose vulnerability is compounded by limited resources,
inadequate physical infrastructure and weak
and ineffective systems of governance. This
reflects profound global inequalities: those
countries that have contributed least to the
problem of climate change will be worst affected by it, while those who have profited
from high levels of greenhouse gas emissions
are the least threatened by the consequences
(Dodman et al., 2009).
The aim of this set of three progress reports on Adaptation and Development is to review debates on the linkages between climate
change adaptation and development from
both theoretical and empirical standpoints,
and to relate these to climate policy. This
first report explores the evolution of the climate change adaptation and development
discourse and describes its relevance to the
field of development studies. The second
report will take a more practical empirical
focus on the relationship between adaptation
and vulnerability, and, acknowledging that a
significant amount of the overlap between
adaptation and development is methodological (see McGray et al., 2007), will consider
how methodologies in development studies
can be applied to adaptation to advance
knowledge on how to do adaptation and reduce vulnerability in the context of climate
change. The third and final report will focus on
climate change and development institutions,
particularly the role of financing adaptation
in the most vulnerable developing countries.1
This issue is of increasing importance following the recognition of the substantial financial commitments required for adaptation at
COP-15 in Copenhagen (Dcember 2009) and

the ongoing discussions about the sources and

disbursement mechanisms for these funds.2
II How development entered the
climate change adaptation agenda
When climate change was first addressed
by the UN General Assembly in 1988, it was
considered in a similar vein to the issues of
acid rain and the ozone layer: as a cross-border,
systemic, essentially environmental issue that
should be managed by international cooperation
to mitigate the causes of pollution upstream
(Ayers and Huq, 2008; Schipper, 2006). This
global and environmental discourse on climate
change initially shied away from adaptation,
on the basis that adaptation was local and
conflicted with the global good of mitigation.
The fear was that some countries might consider their national costs of adaptation to be
so much lower than the costs of mitigation
that no mitigation action could be seen as
a tempting prospect (Kjellen, 2006: iv). Such
a line of argument has been taken in the past
by Al Gore, currently one of the most visible
political advocates of taking action on climate
change, who has argued that believing that
we can adapt to just about anything is ultimately
a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability
to react in time to save our skin (Gore, 1992,
cited Pielke, 1999: 162). Development in climate change terms was therefore initially
associated with emissions trajectories and
mitigation responsibilities.
Since then, adaptation has gradually gained
prominence in climate change science and
policy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) was formed by the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
and World Meteorological Organisation
(WMO) to evaluate the risk of climate change,
and published its first report in 1990 that
established climate change as a global, longterm environmental problem requiring action.
This stimulated the creation of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), adopted in 1992 at the
Earth Summit. Although both mitigation and

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Jessica Ayers and David Dodman 163

adaptation were set out in the Convention,
the focus remained on mitigation.
By the time of the third IPCC report in 2001,
it had become evident that mitigation efforts
would not prevent climate change impacts,
and that these would be felt particularly
strongly in low- and middle-income countries.
Adaptation began to be associated with the
interests of developing countries, and it was
recognised that adaptive capacity was dependent on development contexts. This was
translated into policy in the Marrakech Accords,
established at the seventh Conference of the
Parties to the UNFCCC (COP7) in 2001,
which created three new funds to assist adaptation in developing countries: the Least
Developed Countries Fund to support the
49 least developed countries to adapt to climate
change, and initially used to fund the design of
National Adaptation Programmes of Action
(NAPAs); the Special Climate Change Fund to
support a number of climate change activities
including mitigation and technology transfer,
but intended to prioritise adaptation; and the
Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund, financed
through a levy on the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM)3 and intended to support
concrete adaptation projects in developing
countries.
The IPCCs Fourth Assessment Report
in 2007 showed that climate change impacts
were observable, and gave rise to the message
that action on adaptation, particularly in developing countries, was an urgent priority.
This has penetrated the global rhetoric on
climate change, and adaptation is now seen as
a legitimate policy option alongside mitigation:
even Al Gore was recently reported in the
Economist (11/9/08) as saying I used to think
adaptation subtracted from our efforts on
prevention. But Ive changed my mind Poor
countries are vulnerable and need our help.
The outcomes with regard to policy have seen
COP13 in Bali in 2007 bringing adaptation on
to equal footing with mitigation, highlighting
it as one of four building blocks required in
response to climate change: alongside mitigation, technology cooperation and finance

(Ayers and Huq, 2008). As adaptation

gained prominence in the negotiations and
policy, it has become increasingly branded as
a developing country issue, and supporting
adaptation is often seen as tantamount to supporting development.
III How climate change entered the
development arena
The link between climate change and development was drawn in the development arena as
early as 1987, when the Brundtland Report
Our Common Future cited climate change as
a major environmental challenge facing development (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). In 1992, the
United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development produced the Rio Declaration
and Agenda 21, both of which made explicit
connections between environment and development (UN, 1992). These themes were
taken up by the research community, who began
to apply theories of vulnerability to climate
change adaptation. Development was seen as
making an important contribution to climate
change adaptation through strengthening entitlements and boosting the resilience of individuals and communities (see Adger, 1999;
Cohen, 1998; Sen, 1999; Smit, 1993).
However, the dominance of the mitigation
agenda in the climate change discourse of the
1990s meant that development practitioners
were initially slow to adopt climate change in
practice, perceiving it as an issue of scientific constructiona global scale environmental
problem caused by the universal physical properties of greenhouse gases (Demeritt, 2001:
307), with little relevance for poverty alleviation,
poor communities, and development. This
is reflected by the absence of any clear reference to climate change in the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) drafted in 2001.
However, a 2002 report released by 10 leading
development funding agencies Poverty and
climate change: Reducing the vulnerability
of the poor through adaptation stated that
climate change was a threat to development

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Climate change adaptation and development I

efforts and poverty reduction, including the

achievement of the Millennium Development
Goals, and that pro-poor development was key
to successful adaptation. The report reflects
many of the themes emerging in the academic
literature on vulnerability at the time (for example, Huq et al., 2002; Kates, 2000; Smit
et al., 2000), including recommendations
to support sustainable livelihoods, improve
governance, and make institutions more accountable and participatory (Klein, 2008;
Sperling, 2003).
Since 2002, research and NGO communities
have increasingly incorporated climate change
within their development work, believing they
have the skills, experience, local knowledge and
networks to undertake locally appropriate vulnerability reduction activities that increase
resilience to a range of factors including climate
change. This is particularly evident through
the recently emerging discourse of CommunityBased Adaptation (CBA). CBA claims to
identify, assist, and implement communitybased development activities, research and
policy in regions where adaptive capacity is
as dependent on livelihood indicators as climatic changes. In practice, CBA is often not
dissimilar to development (Polak, 2007); the
difference lying less with the intervention
itself than the inputs to and motivations for
the intervention.
The risks that climate change presents
to development interventions have also
been recognised by many major donors who
are taking steps to mainstream adaptation
into development policies and programmes.
Mainstreaming involves integrating climate
change adaptation into social, institutional
and infrastructural development planning, and
has been adopted in a variety of forms in development policy and practice. Most major
donor agencies including the World Bank,
regional development banks and national
donors, are climate proofing their development
investments by screening them for climate
change vulnerabilities and then taking action

to address them (Burton et al., 2006; Klein

et al., 2007; Schipper, 2006). However, although mainstreaming does link climate change
and development and is seen by many as a
win-win opportunity for development organisations, this approach depicts adaptation as
something external to be tacked onto development rather than being an integral part
of it. In other words, mainstreaming can be
depicted as adaptation plus development, in
contrast to a CBA approach which adopts an
adaptation as development approach.
IV Unresolved tensions between
adaptation and development
The ways in which the adaptation agenda has
evolved within climate change and development discourses has resulted in confusion both
within and between the development and
climate change arenas on several issues: what
adaptation actually is; the distinction between
adaptation and development (indeed, whether
there is a distinction at all); and differing perspectives of how to do good adaptation.
1 Understanding adaptation
Smit et al., (2000) suggest that variations in
interpretations of adaptation include adaptation to what? which can refer to climate,
climate variability, or climate change and
who or what adapts? which might refer to
people, social or economic sectors, processes,
or system structures. Within the international
climate change frameworks of the UNFCCC,
adaptation to what? is interpreted as adaptation specifically to climate change, rather
than to broader climate variability (including
climate change), and without taking into
account underlying drivers of vulnerability
stemming from development needs. This
has given rise to a policy context that is scientific, technical, and environmental, and a
technology based view of adaptation that
has placed priority on adaptation measures
such as dams, early-warning systems, seeds
and irrigation schemes based on specific knowledge of future climate change conditions

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Jessica Ayers and David Dodman 165

(Klein, 2008). Correspondingly, the UNFCCC
treats adaptation in the narrowest sense, as
an issue of climate change, with adaptation
actions limited to changes that are proven to
be anthropogenic and distinct from climatic
variability. Adaptation interventions are therefore stand-alone and additional to baseline
development needs.
However, development practitioners, particularly those engaged with the CBA agenda,
argue that this interpretation of adaptation
limits the extent to which adaptation can
contribute to broader and more sustainable
vulnerability reduction. This has been repeatedly demonstrated through debates in
development studies in relation to disaster risk
reduction (see for example Janssen et al., 2006;
Smit and Wandel, 2006; Wisner et al., 2004)
which connect the risks people face with the
specific and contextual reasons behind their
vulnerability in the first place (Wisner et al.,
2004). Accordingly, technology-based measures can only be partially effective if they do
not also address non-climatic factors that are
the underlying drivers of vulnerability. Klein
(2008) provides the example of improving a
water-supply system where climate change
is associated with increased drought, which
can only be effective in so far as everyone has
equal access to that system; if the unequal
distribution of water rights or the price of
water excludes certain users from the system,
people will remain vulnerable to drought. The
definition of adaptation as an issue of climate
change has created policy frameworks that
do not fit with defining adaptation in terms of
sustainable development.
From a development viewpoint, adaptation
and development are often viewed as synonymous, as stated by Huq and Ayers
(2008a: 52):
Good (or sustainable) development (policies
and practice) can (and often does) lead to
building adaptive capacity. Doing adaptation
to climate change often also means doing
good (or sustainable) development.

Any adaptation intervention cannot

be stand alone but must go hand in hand
with development, as with mainstreaming
(adaptation plus development), or even be
synonymous with development (adaptation
as development). Adaptation as development
would involve making progress against the
development indicators in light of climate
change, including reducing poverty, providing
general education and health benefits, improving living conditions and providing access
to financial markets and technologies, which
will all improve the livelihood of individuals,
households and communities, increasing their
ability to engage in adaptive action (Ayers and
Huq, 2009).
In terms of understanding adaptation, then,
we see three types of adaptation emerging
from the climate change and development communities: stand-alone adaptation, as interpreted under the UNFCCC; and then from
the development community, adaptation plus
development, where development is climate
proofed; and adaptation as development,
where development is the basis for, and in some
cases synonymous with, adaptation, as is the
case with CBA. However, there is a danger of
going too far: not all adaptation is development,
and not all development contributes towards
adaptation. Long term adaptation priorities may
conflict with near-term development priorities.
For example, economic development strategies
which do not take into account the long term
implications of climate change could increase
dependency on climate sensitive resources
and ultimately prove maladaptive.4 Likewise,
climate proofing development interventions
may give rise to a conflict of interest between
external donors wishing to ensure the longer
term resilience of investments, and recipient
countries wishing to maintain ownership
over their development priorities and control
over national development budgets. While for
either process to work, each must reinforce the
other (Huq et al., 2002), greater attention is
needed to resolving tradeoffs between adaptation and development when they arise.

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Climate change adaptation and development I

2 Doing adaptation
These varying perspectives are giving rise to
confusion over how to do adaptation, in some
cases resulting in maladaptive practices that fail
to bring essential adaptation and development
perspectives together in a productive way.
Stand-alone interpretations adopted by the
UNFCCC are proving problematic, as can
be demonstrated by LDC Fund finance for
projects identified under National Adaptation
Programmes of Action (NAPAs). To give a
recent example, one of the projects identified
by the NAPA of Tuvalu is coastal infrastructure
to protect the shoreline from erosion, a problem regardless of climate change (and so an
existing development need), but one exacerbated by climate change (so also an additional
cost). The LDC Fund will only fund the additional cost of adaptation. However, not
only has distinguishing between additional
and baseline adaptation needs on the ground
proved extremely difficult, but, being a poor
country, Tuvalu cannot afford to meet the
costs of baseline infrastructure. Thus, the
offer to fund, as it were, the top section
of the infrastructure required to respond
to additional impacts of climate change, is
absurd in light of the fact that co-financing to
pay for the lower section cannot be found. The
project is currently in limbo while co-financing
is sought (Ayers and Huq, 2009).
On the other hand, the development first
approach frequently fails to give sufficient (if
any) weight to the longer term climate implications on project areas, thereby affecting
the ultimate sustainability of the adaptation
intervention. While development studies has
helped to prove the contextual nature of risk
and the need to address the underlying drivers
of vulnerability, debates around adaptation
cannot be reduced to the technology versus
development dichotomy applied to disaster
risk reduction in the past (see Wisner et al.,
1994). Adaptation to climate change extends
beyond understanding current vulnerability
and must also encompass assessments of
future climatic trends. Therefore, while it is

essential to retain an understanding of the

local nature of vulnerability and its relationship
with the broader development context, there
is also a fundamental need to bring in external
technological expertise (in the form of climate
science and new technologies) to adaptation
or adaptation activities may themselves not be
climate proof .
The failure of some CBA activities to incorporate climate change data in a systematic
way not only threatens the long term viability of these projects, but also alienates them
from larger climate change frameworks. And
although some literature has begun to emerge
which deals with local adaptation case studies
(see, for example, Moss et al., 2001; Morduch
and Sharma, 2002), there is a lack of attention
to scaling up of these examples, and assessing
how they can contribute to larger scale, more
technical approaches (Smit and Wandel,
2006). The result is that:
Local initiatives, to enhanceadaptive capacity, may be constrained or even nullified by
broader social, economic and political forces
that effectively shape local vulnerabilities
(ibid: 289).

V Where are we now?

Much progress has been made in bringing together adaptation and development: the implications of climate change for developing
countries are now well documented, and
adaptation has risen up the international
climate change policy agenda. Development
practitioners have also begun to incorporate
adaptation into their work, highlighting the
need to address the underlying causes of vulnerability in building adaptive capacity to climate change.
However, stand-alone notions of adaptation still persist under the UNFCCC that
fail to incorporate many of the lessons learned
by development practitioners in recent years:
for example about the unexpected and unintended consequences of large scale technical solutions; the depth and breadth of
local knowledge; and the vital importance of

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Jessica Ayers and David Dodman 167

community participation. At the same time,
good development practice also needs to
take climate change adaptation into account
at every stage in order to avoid wasting resources, ensure long-term sustainability and
prevent mal-adaptations. Within both climate change and development arenas there
is a need for greater acceptance of broader
definitions of adaptation that incorporate
development priorities in the context of a
changing climate.
Some steps have been taken to bring together technology based and development
based adaptation, and everything in between.
For example, a recent report from the World
Resources Institute, Weathering the Storm,
reviewed more than 100 initiatives labelled
as adaptation in developing countries, and
found that adaptation and development are
not discrete activities but instead lie along a
continuum from development orientated to
climate change orientated. At the development end, efforts overlap almost completely
with traditional development practice (for
example, much CBA), where activities take
very little account of specific climate change impacts and instead increase general resilience.
Examples include projects that seek to improve
livelihoods, literacy, or womens rights. At
the opposite end, highly specialized activities
exclusively target distinct climate change
impacts, for example funding the climate
change element of coastal infrastructure investment discussed in the example of Tuvalu
above (McGray et al., 2007).
However, such a continuum is difficult
to integrate into existing policy frameworks,
where a development based versus climate
change based dichotomy persists. While the
recent widespread recognition of the implications of climate change for developing
countries has resulted in an increased urgency in the implementation of actions that
contribute to resilience, this has often resulted
in a dysfunctional adaptation discourse that
excludes rather than incorporates fundamental underlying development objectives.

This need for sharing of lessons between the

two communities will be explored with a
more empirical focus in the next article in
this series.
Notes

1. Taken here to be the Least Developed Countries, Small

Island Developing States, and Africa (Huq and Ayers,
2007).
2. The Kyoto Protocol of 1992 was the first international
agreement requiring signatory countries to monitor
and control their greenhouse gas emissions; it expires
in 2012. Subsequent agreements made under the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change have incorporated a focus on adaptation, but
the post-2012 agreement will mark a significant point in
defining the global framework within which mitigation
and adaptation take in the following years.
3. The CDM is a carbon trading mechanism under the
Kyoto protocol that allows countries with GHG reduction targets to generate emissions reductions by
investing in clean development in low- and middleincome countries.
4. Maladaptations are actions or investments that
enhance rather than reduce vulnerability to impacts
of climate change. This can include the shifting of
vulnerability from one social group or place to another; it also includes shifting risk to future generations and/or to ecosystems and ecosystem services
(Ayers, 2009).

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