Beyond binary outcomes in climate adaptation: The illustrative case of desalination

Abstract

This article develops an integrated approach to understanding adaptation outcomes. Current debates tend to consider actions to respond to climate change as either adaptive or maladaptive, leading to binary framings of outcomes as either successful or harmful. To address this, our article considers the vast space that exists between success and failure in climate change adaptation, highlighting the importance of applying the concepts of successful adaptation and maladaptation jointly in analyses of such outcomes. To this end, we develop an integrated framework to examine the major adaptive and maladaptive effects induced by large‐scale seawater desalination. Now a major component of water supply in cities and regions around the world, desalination is increasingly viewed as an adaptation to water challenges linked with climate change. Based on a comprehensive review of the (successful/mal)adaptation literature, we present a matrix that will help academics and practitioners think through the complex and overlapping outcomes of adaptation via desalination in the water sector. We then discuss the insights concerning the configurations of desalination's adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. Overall, we present a threefold argument: (1) that examining successful outcomes alongside maladaptive ones enables a more complete and nuanced understanding of the overall effects of adaptation actions and their spatial and temporal distribution; (2) that a consideration of this can help to highlight the tradeoffs and constraints that are inherent in adaptation in order to support decision‐making; and (3) that a more complex approach to adaptation outcomes can assist in problematizing the social‐political drivers and consequences of adaptation. This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies

From risk reduction to a landscape of (un)desired outcomes: Climate migrants’ perceptions of migration success and failure

“…The different meanings of the sub-themes relating to self-failure vis-à-vis those relating to self-preservation and ful lment, as well as the much higher prevalence of self-failure perceptions, illustrate this. As recent studies suggest in relation to adaptation (Tubi and Williams 2021), these unexclusive sets of objectives imply that any attempt to improve migration outcomes should therefore aim to achieve success while concurrently minimizing the propensity for failure.…”

Water for whom? Desalination and the cooptation of the environmental justice frame in Southern California

“…However, this article has taken the desalination discussion one step further by showing how financial models like PPP alignments facilitate this complexity and can in fact bolster maneuvers that run against community claims. What is more, as social scientists, before we engage in policy debates such as the one initiated by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regarding whether or not desalination is “maladaptive,” because of its problematic carbon footprint (Tubi and Williams, 2021), we should at least at the same time insist on asking questions like: who is served by desalinated water? Where will plants be located?…”

Difficult climate-adaptive decisions in forests as complex social–ecological systems

“…Where forest management has typically assumed that such conditions are stable, however, most never were, and climate change has brought that dynamicity into focus. The renewed need for long-term, multifaceted, and climate-sensitive planning is evident in other social–ecological systems ( 41 ), equally so for sectors, like water, that have typically had decades-long planning horizons ( 42 – 44 ) and for those, like agriculture, in which decision-makers are responsive to annual changes in environmental and market conditions ( 15 , 16 ). For instance, McWethy et al.…”