Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-14 (section)

=== FAQ 14.4 | What are some effective strategies for adapting to climate change that have been implemented across North America, and are there limits to our ability to adapt successfully to future change? ===

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''Climate adaptation is happening across North America. These efforts are differential across sectors, scale and scope. Without more integrative and equitable approaches across broad scales, known as transformational adaptation, the continent may face limits to the future effectiveness of adaptation actions.''

Across North America, progress in introducing climate adaptation is steady, but incremental. Adaptation is typically limited to planning, while implementation is often hindered by ‘soft’ limits, such as access to financial resources, disparate access to information and decision-making tools, the existence of antiquated policies and management frameworks, lack of incentives and highly variable political perceptions of the urgency of climate change.

Cities and other state and local entities are taking the lead in adaptation efforts, particularly in terms of mainstreaming the use of many approaches to adaptation. These approaches include a suite of efforts ranging from assessment of impacts and vulnerability (relative to individuals, communities, jurisdictions, economic sectors, natural resources, etc.), planning processes, implementation of identified strategies and evaluation of the effectiveness of these strategies. Other institutions (e.g., NGOs, professional societies, private engineering and architecture businesses) also are making significant progress in the adaptation arena, particularly at local to regional levels.

The water management and utilities sectors have made significant progress towards implementation of adaptation strategies using broad-based participatory planning approaches. Consideration of climate change is now folded into some ongoing watershed-wide planning efforts. An example is provided by the One-Water-One-Watershed (OWOW) approach followed by the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA) in southern California. SAWPA is a joint powers authority comprising five regional water districts that provide drinking water to more than 6 million people as well as industrial and irrigation water across the 2400-square-mile watershed. The OWOW perspective focuses on integrated planning for multi-benefit projects and explicit consideration of the impacts of any planning option across the entire watershed. Planning is supported by stakeholder-driven advisory bodies organised along themes that consider a full suite of technical, political, environmental and social considerations. SAWPA provides member agencies with decision-support tools and assistance to implement water conservation policies and pricing regimes, and one member agency is an industry leader on potable water recycling.

The marine and coastal fisheries sector also has shown considerable progress in climate adaptation planning, particularly in terms of assessing impacts and vulnerability of fisheries. Along the Pacific Northwest coast of the USA and Alaska, seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts of ocean conditions exacerbated by warming (e.g., O 2 , pH, temperature, sea ice extent) already have informed fisheries and aquaculture management. Similarly, forecasts and warnings have reduced human exposure to the increased risk of toxins from HABs in the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, California, Florida, Texas and the Gulf of Maine.

Professional organisations and insurance play an important part in mainstreaming climate adaptation. Government and private-sector initiatives can help address adaptation efforts through building-design guidelines and engineering standards, as well as insurance tools that reflect the damages from climate impacts. Through the identification of climate risks and proactive adaptation planning, the private sector can contribute to reducing risks throughout North America by securing operations, supply chains and markets.

Indigenous Peoples and rural community efforts across the continent show great potential for enhancing and accelerating adaptation efforts particularly when integrated with Western-based natural resource management approaches, such as cultural burning and other traditional practices that reduce the buildup of fuels, in addition to prescribed fire and mechanical thinning. In the agricultural sector, examples include planting and cultivation of culturally significant plants, as a traditional practice of soil conservation, in addition to food crops or in lieu of synthetic or mechanical soil treatments.

Future changes in climate (e.g., more intense heatwaves, catastrophic wildfire and post-fire erosion, SLR and forced relocations) could exceed the current capacity of human and natural systems to successfully adapt (or ‘hard limits’). The inclusion and equitable contribution of Indigenous Peoples and rural communities in decision-making and governance processes—including recognition of the interdependencies between cities and surrounding areas—increases the likelihood of building adaptive capacity at a pace that is commensurate with present and future climate-change risks.

Large-scale, equitable transformational adaptation likely will be required to respond to the growing rate and magnitude of changes before crossing tipping points where hard limits exist, beyond which adaptation may no longer be possible. Increasingly, there are calls for accelerating and scaling up adaptation efforts, in addition to aligning policies and regulatory legislation at multiple levels of government. Improved processes for adaptation decision making, governance and coordination, across sectors and jurisdictions, could enhance North America’s capacity to adapt to rapid climatic change. These actions include a focused societal shift, across governments, institutions and transnational boundaries, from primarily technological approaches to NbS that help foster changes in perception of risk and, ultimately, human behaviour.

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Box FAQ 14.4

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