Pathways to Climate Change Adaptation: Making Climate Change Action Political

Abstract

Pathway approaches to adaptation highlight the uncertainty of future impacts of climate change and the ongoing, contingent nature of responses to these effects. This article reviews adaptation to climate change literature employing the notion of pathways and argues that these approaches offer a useful framework to spur meaningful adaptation action. After providing an overview of the history of pathway approaches, the paper focuses on four approaches that apply the metaphor of pathways differently: the socioeconomic pathways, dynamic adaptive policy pathways, pathways to resilience, and the social, technology, and environmental pathways to sustainability. Lessons and strengths from each of these approaches are highlighted. Utilizing multiple pathway approaches can further aid in creating useful and usable knowledge. However, the paper concludes by arguing that pathway approaches could be further strengthened by including political concerns and processes. Working to include the broader public within the coproduction of pathways would help achieve this goal.

A Climate-Smart Approach to the Implementation of Land Degradation Neutrality within a Water Catchment Area in Kenya

“…The operationalization of a climate-smart landscape for the implementation of measures to address LDN in the LVWC could contribute to building what is termed as "climate-resilient" pathways [52], which are iterative, continually evolving processes within complex systems that combine adaptation and mitigation to realize the goal of sustainable development. The concept of pathways is not new, and has been used to describe potential trajectories of future development that communities could take in response to local and global environmental, economic, political, and social changes [53]. In this regard, different studies [50,54] have conceptualized various approaches to address complex ecological challenges (e.g., climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss) within landscapes.…”

Learnings from Local Collaborative Transformations: Setting a Basis for a Sustainability Framework

“…The first proposition advocates that local institutions should promote the cocreation of initiatives ('doing it together'), by making use of their collective intelligence. This can involve processes of collaborative envisioning, analyzing scenarios, and setting pathways [26][27][28]. Discussing and agreeing on a shared understanding and analyses of the problem, as well as long-term commitments, are considered critical [29].…”

New York City Panel on Climate Change 2019 Report Chapter 6: Community‐Based Assessments of Adaptation and Equity

“…This type of collaborative engagement of affected communities in all phases of adaptation planning and implementation has been identified by the environmental justice community as a critical need in the New York region (NYCEJA, ; NYCEJA, ; Sandy Regional Assembly, ). More generally, co‐production approaches are considered vital for identification of sustainable adaptation pathways (Eisenhauer, ) and for fostering of equitable and sustainable cities (Rosenzweig et al ., ; Iaione, ; Foster and Iaione, ).…”