All human-environment systems adapt to climate and its natural variation. Adaptation to human-induced change in climate has largely been envisioned as increments of these adaptations intended to avoid disruptions of systems at their current locations. In some places, for some systems, however, vulnerabilities and risks may be so sizeable that they require transformational rather than incremental adaptations. Three classes of transformational adaptations are those that are adopted at a much larger scale, that are truly new to a particular region or resource system, and that transform places and shift locations. We illustrate these with examples drawn from Africa, Europe, and North America. Two conditions set the stage for transformational adaptation to climate change: large vulnerability in certain regions, populations, or resource systems; and severe climate change that overwhelms even robust human use systems. However, anticipatory transformational adaptation may be difficult to implement because of uncertainties about climate change risks and adaptation benefits, the high costs of transformational actions, and institutional and behavioral actions that tend to maintain existing resource systems and policies. Implementing transformational adaptation requires effort to initiate it and then to sustain the effort over time. In initiating transformational adaptation focusing events and multiple stresses are important, combined with local leadership. In sustaining transformational adaptation, it seems likely that supportive social contexts and the availability of acceptable options and resources for actions are key enabling factors. Early steps would include incorporating transformation adaptation into risk management and initiating research to expand the menu of innovative transformational adaptations.

Four propositions drawn from 60 years of natural hazard and reconstruction research provide a comparative and historical perspective on the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Decisions taken over its 288-year history that have made New Orleans so vulnerable to Katrina reflect a long-term pattern of societal response to hazard events-reducing consequences to relatively frequent events, and increasing vulnerability to very large and rare events. Thus Katrina's consequences for New Orleans were truly catastrophic-accounting for most of the estimated 1,570 deaths of Louisiana residents and $40 -50 billion in monetary losses. A comparative sequence and timing of recovery provides a calendar of historical experience against which to gauge progress in reconstruction. Using this calendar, the emergency postdisaster period appears to be longer in duration than that of any other studied disaster. The restoration period, the time taken to restore urban services for the smaller population, is in keeping with or ahead of historical experience. The effort to reconstruct the physical environment and urban infrastructure is likely to take 8 -11 years. Conflicting policy goals for reconstruction of rapid recovery, safety, betterment, and equity are already evident. Actions taken demonstrate the rush to rebuild the familiar in contrast to planning efforts that emphasize betterment. Because disasters tend to accelerate existing economic, social, and political trends, the large losses in housing, population, and employment after Katrina are likely to persist and, at best, only partly recover. However, the possibility of breaking free of this gloomy trajectory is feasible and has some historical precedent.

Sustainable development has broad appeal and little specificity, but some combination of development and environment as well as equity is found in many attempts to describe it. However, proponents of sustainable development differ in their emphases on what is to be sustained, what is to be developed, how to link environment and development, and for how long a time. Despite the persistent definitional ambiguities associated with sustainable development, much work (over 500 efforts) has been devoted to developing quantitative indicators of sustainable development. The emphasis on sustainability indicators has multiple motivations that include decision making and management, advocacy, participation and consensus building, and research and analysis. We select a dozen prominent examples and use this review to highlight their similarities and differences in definition of sustainable development, motivation, process, and technical methods. We conclude that there are no indicator sets that are universally accepted, backed by compelling theory, rigorous data collection and analysis, and influential in policy. This is due to the ambiguity of sustainable development, the plurality of purpose in characterizing and measuring sustainable development, and the confusion of terminology, data, and methods of measurement. A major step in reducing such confusion would be the acceptance of distinctions in terminology, data, and methods. Toward this end, we propose an analytical framework that clearly distinguishes among goals, indicators, targets, trends, driving forces, and policy responses. We also highlight the need for continued research on scale, aggregation, critical limits, and thresholds.

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This review analyzes five efforts to define sustainability values, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Earth Charter, the UN Millennium Declaration, and the Global Scenario Group. It then summarizes empirical trends in sustainability values, attitudes, and behaviors, as measured by multinational and global-scale surveys, related to human and economic development, the environment, and driving forces (population, affluence, technology, and entitlements). The review also summarizes empirical trends related to the values identified by the Millennium Declaration as essential to international relations (e.g., freedom and democracy, equality and shared responsibility), and broader contextual values (e.g., capitalism, globalization, institutional trust, and social change) that have sustainability implications. It then identifies several important attitude-behavior gaps and barriers. Finally this review draws several conclusions regarding future research needs and the value, attitude, and behavioral change needed to achieve sustainability.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Clark University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic Geography.The lives and affairs of men constantly interact with the natural world. Elaborate technical and social mechanisms enable men to seek in nature that which is useful and to buffer that which is harmful to man. To cope with the harmful effects of nature, complex sets of human adjustments are found in all human use systems. By chance, or even by design, these adjustments can prove insufficient to cope with a given set of natural events, and serious and detrimental effects may ensue. Thus a natural hazard is an interaction of man and nature, governed by the coexistent state of adjustment in the human use system and the state of nature in the natural events system. In this context, it is those extreme events of nature that exceed the capabilities of the system to reflect, absorb, or buffer that lead to the harmful effects, ofttimes dramatic, that characterize our image of natural hazards. But it is also the continuous process of adjustment that enables men to survive and indeed benefit from the natural world. Therefore, the burden of hazard is twofold: a continuing effort to make the human use system less vulnerable to the vagaries of nature, and specific impacts on man and his works arising from natural events that exceed the adjustments incorporated into the system.For the past dozen years, the collaborators in Natural Hazard Research have sought to study this process of adjustment.1 Beginning with floods, these studies were extended to coastal storm, earthquake, drought, and snow hazard. Subsequently, the list has been enlarged by colleagues and students to include tsunami, frost, coastal erosion, and water

Although loss of life from natural hazards has been declining, the property losses from those causes have been increasing. At the same time the volume of research on natural hazards and the books reviewing findings on the subject have also increased. Several major changes have occurred in the topics addressed. Emphasis has shifted from hazards to disasters. There has been increasing attention to vulnerability. Views of causation have changed. Four possible explanations are examined for the situation in which more is lost while more is known: (1) knowledge continues to be flawed by areas of ignorance; (2) knowledge is available but not used effectively; (3) knowledge is used effectively but takes a long time to have effect; and (4) knowledge is used effectively in some respects but is overwhelmed by increases in vulnerability and in population, wealth, and poverty. r

How do long-term global trends affect a transition to sustainability? We emphasize the ''multitrend'' nature of 10 classes of trends, which makes them complex, contradictory, and often poorly understood. Each class includes trends that make a sustainability transition more feasible as well as trends that make it more difficult. Taken in their entirety, they serve as a checklist for the consideration of global trends that impact place-based sustainability studies.