Dear Adaptation Mavens,

I’ve finally convinced my boss that climate change is real and that we need to act now to reduce our vulnerability to climate change. But I can’t believe it—before actually DOING something, he wants to spend valuable time and money on a vulnerability assessment. Don’t we already know enough to act?

Distressed in the Dakotas

Dear DiD,

We applaud your dedication to helping your boss understand that climate change has the potential to affect your organization, and that he needs to do something about it. But we also agree with your boss that doing a vulnerability assessment is an important first step in taking action to reduce vulnerability to climate change. I had a statistics professor who said that you should spend a minimum of 10% of your project budget on preliminary research so that you’d know how to properly design your experiments, and I’d say the same is roughly true for adapting your work to climate change.

Jumping right into adaptation without doing a VA first is like building a house without designing it ahead of time. You may know the sorts of components the house should have—a roof, walls, windows, and doors—but if you don’t think about what should go where before building, you may end up with a house that isn’t very functional. Looking at existing houses and getting opinions about how well they work is a good learning tool, but simply using the design for someone else’s perfect house without thinking about the particulars of your own situation may not lead to success either. A house that’s perfect for the tropics may not be perfect for the Arctic, and a house that’s perfect for a large family may not be perfect for a small family.

Moving from metaphor to reality (or at least to something closer to your actual situation), let’s think about how this applies to conservation or resource management. Despite the urgency you feel, there a some good reasons to take a look around and assess your situation before you dive right in. For example, a group trying to develop and enact adaptation strategies in a region where there is a lot of mistrust may need to spend a lot more time and effort on simply getting all the stakeholders on board and building a process that they’ll buy into. For instance, the Florida Reef Resilience Program (http://www.cakex.org/case-studies/499) had staff members traveling all over southern Florida to build a solid constituency before trying to bring everyone together. The result is a Climate Change Action Plan for the Florida Reef System (http://www.cakex.org/virtual-library/1281) that has widespread support. In contrast, a group developing guidelines for incorporating climate change into the Environmental Impact Assessment Process in Nova Scotia (Practitioner's Guide to Incorporating Climate Change into the Environmental Impact Assessment Process, http://www.cakex.org/virtual-library/1237) needed to spend less time on stakeholder engagement, focusing instead on testing their guidelines against actual projects to see how they’d work in the real world (Evaluation of the ClimAdapt Guide to Incorporating Climate Change into the Environmental Impact Assessment Process, http://www.cakex.org/virtual-library/1236). In both cases, however, the projects devoted time to understanding the climate vulnerabilities of the systems in question.

We’d like to point out that a vulnerability assessment doesn’t have to be a complex, expensive, involved process that bogs down your efforts to take action. The basic steps are fairly simple: clarify your goal, outline the ways in which climate influences your goal, assess possible climatic changes and their effects on ecosystems and human behavior, and think about what that means for your work. You can do this over a couple of days relying primarily on local knowledge (e.g. The Climate Witness Community Toolkit project in Fiji, http://www.cakex.org/tools/climate-witness-community-toolkit), or you can spend years amassing and analyzing scientific data and developing and testing downscaled climate models for your region. How involved the assessment should be depends on available time, money, and data as well as on what your adaptation goals and options are.  If your agency is evaluating the need to rewrite water quality criteria in light of climate change, you’d probably need a more in-depth, technical vulnerability assessment. If you work for a coastal land trust wondering how to adjust its acquisition priorities in light of things like sea level rise, a less technical vulnerability assessment may very likely be sufficient.

We do sympathize with your desire to see some real action, though. Over the past decade, there have been a lot more “calls for action” than real action, a lot more emphasis on understanding impacts than on figuring out how to reduce vulnerability, and a lot more research geared towards scientific understanding than on innovative management. The bottom line is that we need both vulnerability assessments AND adaptation action. Doing adaptation without a vulnerability assessment is like building a house without any planning; continued focus on climate change impacts without working to reduce vulnerability is like calculating exactly how long it will be until you run into a wall rather than avoiding running into it in the first place.

Keep up the good work! And please remember to post your work on CAKE as a case study when you start.