Coping and Adaptation in Response to Environmental and Climatic Stressors in Caribbean Coastal Communities

Abstract

Cumulative and synergistic impacts from environmental pressures, particularly in low-lying tropical coastal regions, present challenges for the governance of ecosystems, which provide natural resource-based livelihoods for communities. Here, we seek to understand the relationship between responses to the impacts of El Niño and La Niña events and the vulnerability of mangrove-dependent communities in the Caribbean region of Colombia. Using two case study sites, we show how communities are impacted by, and undertake reactive short-term responses to, El Niño and La Niña events, and how such responses can affect their adaptive capacity to progressive environmental deterioration. We show that certain coping measures to climate variability currently deliver maladaptive outcomes, resulting in circumstances that could contribute to system ‘lock-in’ and engender undesirable ecological states, exacerbating future livelihood vulnerabilities. We highlight the significant role of social barriers on vulnerabilities within the region, including perceptions of state abandonment, mistrust and conflicts with authorities. Opportunities to reduce vulnerability include enhancing the communities’ capacity to adopt more positive and preventative responses based on demonstrable experiential learning capacity. However, these will require close cooperation between formal and informal organisations at different levels, and the development of shared coherent adaptation strategies to manage the complexity of multiple interacting environmental and climatic pressures.

Perspectives of racialized immigrant communities on adaptability to climate disasters following the UN Roadmap for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030

“…For example, various studies suggested how climate change disproportionately affects members of disadvantaged communities and groups who face socioeconomic inequalities, including many people of color (Berberian et al, 2022; Hansen et al, 2013; Shonkoff et al, 2011). People experience the impacts of climatic stressors differently, and their vulnerability and adaptive capacity to disasters are shaped by social determinants (Cardona et al, 2012; Carmen et al, 2022; Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021; Touza et al, 2021) and intersectional positionality (Kuran et al, 2020; Thomas et al, 2019; Versey, 2021). Given the multi‐dimensional nature of vulnerability and disasters risks, the intersectional analysis grounded in a relational theoretical framework, explores vulnerability's complex and divergence aspects: by explicitly focusing on how individuals and groups experience and adapt to climate change‐induced stressors differently and based on their relative positionality, intersecting factors and situatedness in broader power structures (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014; Kuran et al, 2020; Osborne, 2015; Versey, 2021).…”

Science and policy lessons learned from a decade of adaptation to the emergent risk of sargassum proliferation across the tropical Atlantic

“…Where there are efforts to address the root causes of vulnerability, and a continuous process to engage with and manage the risk, evidence shows that living with risk can strengthen the adaptive capabilities of affected communities [15]. There is also evidence to the contrary that living with risk, where vulnerability is not addressed, can generate behaviours that have maladaptive outcomes [16], and where taking adaptive action does not guarantee a successful outcome [17,18] as adaptation opens up new unexpected vulnerabilities. This literature highlights a variety of skills needed to avoid moving towards maladaptive responses, notably: understanding the nature of the changing risk; ability to recognise and respond to changes; societal ability to organize and act collectively; or the agency to determine whether to change or not.…”