Mark Pelling - Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation  

Adaptation to Climate Change

The impacts of climate change are already being felt. Learning how to live with these impacts is a priority for human development. In this context, it is too easy to see adaptation as a narrowly defensive task protecting core assets or functions from the risks of climate change. A more profound engagement, which sees climate change risks as a product and driver of social as well as natural systems, and their interaction, is called for.

Adaptation to Climate Change argues that without care, adaptive actions can deny the deeper political and cultural roots that call for significant change in social and political relations if human vulnerability to climate change associated risk is to be reduced. This book presents a framework for making sense of the range of choices facing humanity, structured around resilience (stability), transition (incremental social change and the exercising of existing rights) and transformation (new rights claims and changes in political regimes). The resilience transitiontransformation framework is supported by three detailed case study chapters. These also illustrate the diversity of contexts in which adaption is unfolding, from organisations to urban governance and the national polity.

This text is the first comprehensive analysis of the social dimensions to climate change adaptation. Clearly written in an engaging style, it provides detailed theoretical and empirical chapters and serves as an invaluable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in climate change, geography and development studies.

Mark Pelling is a Reader in Geography at Kings College London and before this at the University of Liverpool and University of Guyana. His research and teaching focus on human vulnerability and adaptation to natural hazards and climate change. He has served as a lead author with the IPCC and as a consultant for UNDP, DFID and UN-HABITAT.

Adaptation to Climate Change

From resilience to transformation

Mark Pelling

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2011
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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2011 Mark Pelling

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pelling, Mark, 1967
Adaptation to climate change / Mark Pelling.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-47750-5 (hardback)ISBN 978-0-415-47751-2 (pbk.)
1. Climatic changes. 2. Climate change mitigation.
3. Human beingsEffect of climate on. 4. Acclimatization. I. Title.
QC903.P44 2010
304.25dc22
2010013609

ISBN 0-203-88904-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 9780415477505 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780415477512 (pbk)

ISBN: 9780203889046 (ebk)

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