Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-18 (section)

===== 18.2.5.1.1 Adaptation and Climate Resilient Development =====

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Given that adaptation is recognised as a key element of addressing climate risk and CRD, the capacity for adaptation implementation is an important consideration for CRD. The AR5 noted a significant overlap between indicators of sustainable development and the determinants of adaptive capacity, and suggested that adaptation presents an opportunity to reduce stresses on development processes and the socio-ecological foundations upon which they depend ( [[#Denton--2014|Denton et al., 2014]] ). At the same time, it also noted that building adaptive capacity for sustainable development might require transformational changes that shift impacted systems to new patterns, dynamics or places ( [[#Denton--2014|Denton et al., 2014]] ). Thus, adaptation interventions and pathways can further the achievement of development goals such as food security ( [[#Campbell--2016|Campbell et al., 2016]] ; [[#Douxchamps--2016|Douxchamps et al., 2016]] ; [[#Richardson--2018|Richardson et al., 2018]] ; [[#Bezner%20Kerr--2019|Bezner Kerr et al., 2019]] ) and improvements in human health ( [[#Watts--2019|Watts et al., 2019]] ) including in systems where animals and humans live in close proximity ( ''very high confidence'' ) ( [[#Zinsstag--2018|Zinsstag et al., 2018]] ). However, to do so requires not only the avoidance of incremental adaptation actions that extend current unsustainable practices, but also the ability to manage and overcome the barriers which arise when the limits of incremental adaptation are reached ( ''high agreement'' , ''medium evidence'' ) ( [[#Few--2017|Few et al., 2017]] ; [[#Vermeulen--2018|Vermeulen et al., 2018]] ; [[#Fedele--2019|Fedele et al., 2019]] ).

Since AR5, the scientific community has deepened its understanding of the relationship between adaptation and sustainable development ( ''very high confidence'' ), particularly with regard to the place of resilience at the intersection of these two arenas. The literature has moved forward in its identification of specific overlaps in sustainable development indicators and determinants of adaptive capacity, how adaptation might reduce stress on development processes and their socio-ecological foundation, and how building adaptive capacity might facilitate needed transformative changes. Broadly speaking, work on these topics comes from one of two perspectives. One perspective speaks to adaptation practices that might further sustainable development outcomes, while another perspective draws on deeper understandings of the socio-ecological dynamics of the systems in which we live, and which we may have to transform in the face of climate change impacts. These two literatures are not yet well integrated, leaving gaps in our knowledge of how best to implement adaptation in a manner that achieves sustainable development.

The literature considering adaptation and development in practice since AR5 suggests that efforts to connect adaptation to sustainable development should address proximate and systemic drivers of vulnerability ( [[#Wise--2016|Wise et al., 2016]] ), while remaining flexible and reversable to avoid the lock-in of undesirable or maladaptive trajectories ( [[#Cannon--2010|Cannon and Müller-Mahn, 2010]] ; [[#Wise--2016|Wise et al., 2016]] ). Such goals require critical reflection on processes for decision making and learning. In the AR5, more inclusive, participatory adaptation processes were presumed to benefit development planning by including a wider set of actors in discussions of future goals ( [[#Denton--2014|Denton et al., 2014]] ). The post-AR5 literature expands on these critical perspectives to provide context regarding when participation is most effective. For example, ( [[#Eriksen--2015|Eriksen et al., 2015]] ) emphasise the need to build participatory adaptation processes to avoid subsuming adaptation goals to development-as-usual, while ( [[#Kim--2017b|Kim et al., 2017b]] ) argues that this practice is most effective when it is focused on development efforts and considers how climate change will challenge the goals of those efforts. Adaptation, while presenting an opportunity to foster transformations needed to address the impacts of climate change on human well-being, is also a contested process that is inherently political ( ''medium agreement'' , ''medium evidence'' ) ( [[#Eriksen--2015|Eriksen et al., 2015]] ; [[#Mikulewicz--2019|Mikulewicz, 2019]] ; Nightingale Böhler, 2019; [[#Eriksen--2021b|Eriksen et al., 2021b]] ). How adaptation can challenge development and create a situation where CRD effectively becomes transformative adaptation, adaptation that generates transformation of broader aspects of development, remains unclear ( ''medium agreement'' , ''limited evidence'' ) ( [[#Few--2017|Few et al., 2017]] ; [[#Schipper--2020c|Schipper et al., 2020c]] ).

The critical literature on socio-ecological resilience, which has grown substantially since the last AR ( ''very high confidence'' ), speaks to some of these questions. Since AR5, the IPCC and the wider literature on socio-ecological resilience have shifted their use of the term to reflect not only the capacity to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, but also the ability to adapt, learn and transform in ways that maintains socio-ecology’s essential function, identity and structure (Chapter 1; Glossary, Annex II). This change in usage is significant in that it shifts resilience from an emergent property of complex socio-ecological systems to a deeply human product of efforts to manage ecology, economy and society to specific ends. This definition of resilience recognises the need to define what is an essential identity, function and structure for a given system, questions rooted not in ecological dynamics, but in politics, agency, difference and power that emerge around the management of ecological dynamics ( [[#Cote--2011|Cote and Nightingale, 2011]] ; [[#Brown--2013|Brown, 2013]] ; [[#Cretney--2014|Cretney, 2014]] ; [[#Forsyth--2018|Forsyth, 2018]] ; [[#Matin--2018|Matin et al., 2018]] ; [[#Carr--2019|Carr, 2019]] ).

By connecting this framing of socio-ecological dynamics to the literature on the principles for adaptation efforts that meet development goals, new work has begun to identify 1) how adaptation can reduce stress on development processes, 2) how it might facilitate transformative change and 3) where adaptation interventions might either drive system rigidity and precarity, or otherwise challenge development goals ( [[#Castells-Quintana--2018|Castells-Quintana et al., 2018]] ; [[#Carr--2020|Carr, 2020]] ). For example, [[#Jordan--2019|Jordan (2019)]] draws upon these contemporary framings of resilience to highlight the ways in which coping strategies perpetuate the gendered norms and practices at the heart of women’s vulnerability in Bangladesh. [[#Forsyth--2018|Forsyth (2018)]] draws upon this work to highlight the ways in which the theory of change processes used by development organisations tend to exclude local experiences and sources of risk, and thus foreclose the need for transformative pathways to achieve development goals. Carr ( [[#Carr--2019|Carr, 2019]] ; 2020) draws upon evidence from sub-Saharan Africa to develop more nuanced understandings of the ways in which different stressors and interventions either facilitate or foreclose transformative pathways, while pointing to the existence of yet poorly understood thresholds for transformation in systems that can be identified and targeted by interventions.

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