Moving beyond short-term coping and adaptation

Abstract

Throughout human history, people have coped with, and adapted to, their environment. This accumulated capacity at local level is increasingly recognized to be critical in improving resilience and transformation. Nevertheless, city dwellers' coping and adaptive practices are little known, poorly documented and often not taken into account in the work of municipal authorities and aid organizations. Against this background, this study provides a systematic overview of urban residents' coping and adaptive practices, presents critical insights into their risk-reducing effects and discusses their role in the development of policies and projects to increase resilience. It shows that coping should not automatically be seen as maladaptive. The success or failure of urban societies in building resilience and moving towards transformation does not necessarily depend on the effectiveness of individual coping strategies but on the flexibility and inclusiveness of coping/adaptation systems at the individual, household and community level (i.e. the combined set of strategies). Therefore, it is crucial to support the ability of urban communities to negotiate their needs and rights in order to increase the flexibility and inclusiveness of these systems and make them more viable in today's context.

Can Strategies to Cope with Hazard Shocks be Explained by At-Risk Households’ Socioeconomic Asset Profile? Evidence from Tropical Cyclone-Prone Coastal Bangladesh

“…These imply that households who adopted a higher number of coping practices were relatively better-off in terms of socioeconomic asset profile (that is, households possess more elements of an asset profile). This is consistent with the findings by Barrett et al (2001), Yamin et al (2005a, b), and Wamsler and Brink (2014). These better-off households were less likely to be socioeconomically vulnerable and also less likely to live below the poverty threshold (Table 2).…”

“…Paying attention to such poverty traps, along with the trade-offs between short-term coping and long-term adaptation strategies, is pivotal in terms of sustainable livelihood. This is especially true when addressing impacts from climatic hazards (Yamin et al 2005a, b;Paul and Routray 2010;Wamsler and Brink 2014) and the harsh features of these hazards, such as speed of onset, severity, and duration that may result in indirect risks such as a sudden rise in food prices due to diminished agricultural production in response to climate extremes.…”

Household responses to climate-related hazards in four Latin American cities: A conceptual framework and exploratory analysis

“…Although different types of responses (i.e., mitigation, coping, and adaptation) are naturally conceptualized as a primary construct in vulnerability frameworks (e.g., Cutter, 1996;O'Brien et al, 2007;Romero-Lankao and Qin, 2011;Turner et al, 2003), they are usually not treated as the prioritized question or focal point. As a result, rarely have coping and adaptive practices of local populations been systematically documented and incorporated into environmental policy decision-making (Wamsler and Brink, 2014). Existing vulnerability research generally revolves around present and/or anticipated impacts of climate change hazards, or those contextual conditions which render populations more or less susceptible to subsequent consequences.…”

Planning for Climatic Extremes and Variability: A Review of Swedish Municipalities’ Adaptation Responses

“…Simply put, the more redundant and diverse the back-up measures that a system provides for addressing a specific risk factor are, then the more flexible that system is. Flexible and inclusive systems translate into the ability to change in response to altered circumstances and to carry on functioning even when individual parts fail [42,55].…”