Emergence and Transition in London’s Climate Change Adaptation Pathways

Abstract

Climate change adaptation coevolves with urban development trajectories presenting decision-makers with a choice of positioning adaptation to protect or revise development. This relational view of adaptation in the context of large cities opens questions on the ways in which city and other actors interact. This interaction may be as or more important than resource and information access for shaping the adaptive capacity and direction of such assemblages. Transitions between modes of adaptation are little understood and will likely combine autonomous and deliberate change both incremental and transformative. Using London as a case study, the paper identifies the contemporary adaptation regime to extreme events and its lines of movement. Interviews and a scenario workshop with resilience planners and emergency managers show the orientation of London's adaptation is firmly positioned in a mode of resilience, protecting development through flexibility. Maintaining resilience to extremes under conditions of economic austerity is seen to result in the shifting of risk management burdens onto those at risk. Self-reliance is emerging as a mechanism for deepening the resilience mode of adaptation. At the same time, when considering potential risks for extreme events in 2035, most planners express a desire for more transformative adaptation that can tackle root causes in social conditions. A gap is revealed between the professional judgment of risk and resilience planning needs and likely trajectories constrained by national administrations and policy.

Analysis of employment change in response to hurricane landfalls

“…Two common unit root tests are implemented to test the stationary of the respective time series and to identify the value of d in the model. The Phillips and Perron (1988) and augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) tests are applied in our study to analyze the stationarity of employment variables in different counties; if d equals 0, this indicates that the time series is stationary in levels. If not, the first (or second, third, etc.)…”

Innovation Pathways to Adaption for Humanitarian and Development Goals: A Case Study of Aftershock Forecasting for Disaster Risk Management

“…The organisations values, purpose, and structure remain the same (to provide early warnings to save lives) and change is relatively shallow and involves the modification of existing programme delivery so that outcomes are enhanced. These activities equate with resilience building to the extent that actions aim at doing current things better rather than thinking beyond the present paradigm (Pelling, Abeling and Garschagen 2016).…”

Editorial

“…Building consensus on the desired relationship between adaptation and development may not be easy and might be forced, perhaps worst is the silent emergence of an adaptation-development nexus without scrutiny and reflection. The growing literature on adaptation as political and value filled (Pelling 2011;Carter et al 2015) helps to reveal parallels with development and challenge researchers and planners to better articulate whose values, visions and preferences orient adaptation, development and the adaptation-development nexus.…”

“…At the city level biophysical and social vulnerability (Welle and Birkmann 2016a) assessment included participatory scenario workshops used to describe current, preferred and potential future relationships between development and risk management that would shape options and outcomes for adaptation. Individual expert interviews with city level stakeholders helped explain why preferred states were difficult to obtain and rarely expected in the future in Kolkata , Lagos (Ajibade et al 2016), London (Pelling et al 2016), New York (Solecki et al 2016) and Tokyo (Nishi et al 2016). Expected future states were often further from the preferred state than the current.…”