We're going to use the next several lectures to talk about adaptation. To get us started down that path, we'll go over some basic vocabulary, and we'll introduce a conceptual framework that helps us identify what an adaptation action is, and what it's supposed to achieve. Let's jump in starting with the term adaptation; adaptation is the process of preparing for climate impacts both now, and in the future. Now, unlike mitigation, which focuses on limiting the amount of climate change that occurs, adaptation is focused on addressing the climate impacts, so the consequences of a change in climate. Now, notice in this definition, we should be taking into account the climate impacts, not just from climate change, but those that might come up in the current climate. I've added a second definition here; adaptation is also a way of managing, and reducing our climate risk. Risk is a word that pops up in a lot of different contexts, ranging from public health, to insurance, to financial investments. In each of those arenas, it may have a slightly different connotation. In the climate adaptation context, the word risk has a few nuances that we need to spend a little time unpacking. Here is what's going to help us do that, here's a framework for thinking about climate risk. We can think about it as the intersection of three factors: a weather or climate event that poses a hazard, and that's the darkest blue oval here. Exposure, which describes whether or not you might actually experience that hazard, which is a different shade of blue here, in the Southeast direction. Vulnerability is the third factor, which is a really broad term that covers your state of being, when that hazard hits, and that's that bluish shade that's pointing more to the Northeast. Vulnerability includes how well prepared you might be for that hazard, how well you can absorb the consequences of the hazard, and how well you can bounce back. When we have an individual, or a community where all three of these factors: a hazard, exposure, and vulnerability are in play, then that individual or community is the bearer of climate risk. Now I'm going to focus most of the rest of our discussion on people, and I'll keep referring to individuals and communities, but we can talk about risks to other things like Infrastructure, or even an ecosystem. In the most elegant of analyses, we would actually delve into the inner connections of risk among systems, whether those systems be social, cultural, political, economic, built, ecological, whatever. But that gets a little bit beyond the scope of our course, so for the time being let's keep it simple, and we'll talk mostly about people. Okay we'll spend the next few minutes talking about each of the three ingredients of climate risks. Let's start with the weather, or climate hazard. These are probably pretty easy things to imagine. Think of a heat wave, a flood, or a wildfire. Although these examples are usually abrupt events, we can also have hazards that are extended in time, like a drought that might persist for months, or even years. Some other slow moving hazards might be the thawing of permafrost, or the enhancement of erosion, which are processes that can take place over years, and climate can certainly have a big impact on them. It's also important to note that the hazards don't have to be caused by, or attributed to climate change. For example, we could talk about hazards like extreme heat in Phoenix, or flooding in a coastal place like Louisiana. Both hazards are natural features of those climates, they would happen even in the absence of climate change. However, if we want to manage future risk, we want to manage the risk going forward, we should probably think about how climate change alters the frequency, and severity of future heat in Phoenix, say, or a future flooding in Louisiana. Let's move on to exposure: exposure is the extent to which you will experience a particular hazard, so let's think about extreme heat. An outdoor construction worker, as illustrated by the hard hat, and gloves here, is going to be exposed to a heat wave since she is spending most of her time working outside. But an office worker is likely to be less exposed, most of her day is spent in air conditioning, hopefully the office has air conditioning, and she can dodge the heat. For that heat wave example, occupation has a lot to do with exposure. Now there's another important factor, and that's geography. Now looking at the next slide, we have a photo of a beach and a mountain village. While both look like wonderful vacation spots, they have exposure to different climate hazards. The beach is going to be subject to sea level rise, and with that, flooding, salt water intrusion, and potentially enhanced erosion. In the mountains, we're likely pretty far away from the ocean, so we wouldn't be exposed to sea level rise up there, but we would be exposed to things like forest fires, and changes in stream flow associated with less snow accumulating, or perhaps earlier snowmelt. Both those impacts would be less of a concern, if at all at the beach, we wouldn't be worried about that snowmelt stuff. Let's continue to the third factor in climate risk vulnerability. Now this is a really broad category, but crucially important when we think about managing risk. Vulnerability captures the extent to which a hazard, when you experience it, would result in negative consequences. In other words, if you're exposed to something like a flood or a wildfire, how will you be affected? Will you lose your house or your livelihood? Or will you just get a little water in your basement or some damage to your landscaping? If you do experience a catastrophic loss, would you be out on the street and unemployed or would you just file an insurance claim and hangout at your second home for awhile? These are extreme examples that I'm hypothetically talking through, but there are many, many factors that can contribute to vulnerability. I've tried to include these icons to highlight a few of them here. Wealth, as shown by the dollar sign, is a big one. It determines if you have things, like insurance, if you live in an apartment or a home that is in better shape or worse shape. If that home, that dwelling could withstand hazards for standing up against storms and floods. Wealth also is an indicator of whether you have options for finding work. Usually you'd become more mobile in an economic sense. If you're physically more mobile, if you can afford to move from place to place to avoid hazards, or to relocate after a hazard occurs. The state of your health shown by this little medical cross, is also a really important factor. For example, people in poor health may have respiratory or cardiovascular issues during a heatwave or when a forest fire affects the air quality. Meanwhile, healthier people may barely noticed these hazards. Age can be another big factor and I've shown the baby icon to represent that. Children and the elderly can be more vulnerable to hazards, since they have a higher chance of just being a dependent. If those that care for children or for the elderly have their lives disrupted by a climate hazard, the very young or the very old, might find it challenging to provide for their own basic needs. Other icons I've shown here include what languages a person speaks and reads. For example, if warnings about a hazard are being issued in English, and you don't read or understand English that well, then you might be less prepared for facing the hazard. I've also got a car on here, access to transportation and can be another vulnerability factor. If you rely solely on public transit and a climate hazard interrupts that service, then you might not be able to get to work, or if you require medical assistance, you might not be able to get to a hospital. The last icon, a group of people, is one that has a more positive spin to it. Research has shown that if people have connections and support through a social network, then they tend to do better when faced with a climate hazard. The network could be your family or neighbors, or people that you interact with at a civic institution like a school or a church. One of the earliest pieces of research that showed the importance of these networks looked at people's health outcomes. In Chicago following a heat wave in 1995. The work showed that in those tighter in neighborhoods, people were more likely to check on their elderly neighbors and see how they were doing, and in neighborhoods where residents were less connected, the elderly folks had much higher mortality rates, sadly. I don't have an icon for one area, but it's critical to recognize that race and gender also have strong connections to vulnerability. Systematic racism, sexism in our social and political systems have created big differences in things like wealth, preexisting health conditions, and the structure of our social networks. While I couldn't condense all that into a single icon or find an icon that I'm satisfied with, I want to make sure that we recognize that past and present discrimination has an important imprint on an individual or a community's vulnerability. We've gone through the three factors that contribute to risk: the hazard, the exposure, and vulnerability. If we want to lower climate risk, we often think about working on these three areas, so we can make the hazard less frequent or less severe. We can try to reduce our exposure to the hazard, or we can try to reduce our vulnerability. That said, that thinking can often be a little unattractive to a decision-maker, because we're only talking about avoiding bad things rather than achieving something good. I want to introduce this slightly alternative lens to adaptation. Where we focus more on this, this idea of resilience. An analogy for resilience that I like is the rubber band. We can stretch it, but it will relax back to its original shape. I put a more technical definition on this slide. "Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb a disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain the same function structure, Identity, and feedbacks." Now, if we did a great job at managing and lowering our climate risk, we would likely have made our community more resilient. Although I will probably talk a lot about risk management in the next few lectures, I want to plant a seed that our ultimate goal is really achieving resilience. It may be a little more constructive or a little easier to convince others to think about working towards resilience, which has a more positive spin, rather than lowering risk, which is more about avoiding bad. This is a subtle difference because the two are really substantively very close siblings. That concludes our introduction to adaptation. Thanks for your attention and look forward to seeing you in the next video.
