Understanding the Shifting Climate Landscape
The effects of climate change are already being felt across the United States, with regions experiencing the direct impacts through more frequent and intense storms, longer-lasting heatwaves, increased wildfires, and rising sea levels. For many communities, these climate-driven threats are an immediate concern, not a distant possibility. As these impacts are expected to intensify over time, adapting to current and future climate change has become a critical challenge that communities must address to mitigate the risks.
Adaptation takes place at multiple levels – national, regional, and local – as governments, businesses, communities, and individuals respond to today’s altered climate conditions and prepare for future changes based on the specific impacts relevant to their geography and vulnerabilities. The process of adaptation involves five key stages: awareness, assessment, planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. While these phases naturally build on one another, they are often not executed sequentially, and the terminology may vary across different organizations and sectors.
Confronting the Challenge of Non-Stationarity
A critical aspect of adaptation is the ability to anticipate future climate impacts and plan accordingly. Historically, decision-makers have made plans based on the assumption that the current and future climate in their location will resemble the recent past. This stationarity assumption, however, is no longer reliable. Climate change is altering both the frequency and variability of weather events, pushing many climate-influenced effects outside the range of recorded recent natural variability.
Increasingly, planners, engineers, developers, and other professionals are recognizing the need to take current and projected climate conditions into account when making decisions about the location and design of infrastructure, setting engineering standards, determining insurance rates, and managing land use, disaster response, and natural resources. Failing to anticipate and adjust to these changes can be costly, as communities may find their existing plans and practices inadequate for addressing the new climate reality.
Embracing Iterative Risk Management
To effectively navigate the challenges posed by a changing climate, organizations have adopted a wide range of approaches that address the five general stages of adaptation. Iterative risk management provides a comprehensive framework and set of processes for this purpose. This approach emphasizes that adaptation is an ongoing cycle of assessment, action, reassessment, learning, and response, rather than a one-time set of judgments.
Iterative risk management helps organizations and communities assess risks and vulnerabilities from climate and other drivers of change, take actions to reduce those risks, and learn over time. It involves steps for anticipating, identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing current and future climate risks, as well as choosing appropriate strategies to reduce them. This process also includes monitoring and adjusting actions as new information becomes available and risks evolve.
Iterative risk management is consistent with many of the climate adaptation approaches currently in use, such as climate vulnerability assessments, iterative risk assessments, and adaptive management practices. By using a comprehensive framework, decision-makers can compare and allocate investments, identify incentives for managing and reducing risk, and situate climate adaptation within broader risk management activities across sectors.
Maximizing the Benefits of Adaptation
Proactive adaptation initiatives, including changes to policies, business operations, and capital investments, can yield significant benefits that exceed their costs, both in the near term and over the long run. Benefitâcost analysis can help guide organizations toward actions that most efficiently reduce risks, particularly those that could prove extremely costly if not addressed.
However, effective adaptation can provide a wide range of benefits that are difficult to quantify, such as improvements in economic opportunity, health, equity, security, education, social connectivity, and sense of place, as well as the safeguarding of cultural resources and environmental quality. Considering these diverse outcomes separately, through multi-objective or multi-criteria analysis, can facilitate participatory planning processes and enhance the fairness of adaptation strategies.
Equity considerations are particularly important, as poor or marginalized populations often face higher climate risks due to their increased exposure, sensitivity, and lack of adaptive capacity. Prioritizing adaptation actions for these communities and ensuring their meaningful participation in planning can lead to more equitable and effective outcomes.
Integrating Climate Adaptation into Existing Practices
A significant portion of climate risk can be addressed by mainstreaming, which involves integrating climate adaptation into existing organizational and sectoral investments, policies, and practices, such as planning, budgeting, policy development, and operations and maintenance. This approach can make adaptation more likely to succeed by building on familiar processes and improving the treatment of uncertainty, rather than requiring entirely new decision-making structures.
Mainstreaming climate adaptation has already begun in many areas, such as financial risk reporting, capital investment planning, engineering standards, military planning, and disaster risk management. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense is integrating climate change considerations into its analysis, plans, and programs to address the impacts on force readiness, military bases, and training ranges.
However, mainstreaming alone may not be sufficient to address the full range of climate risks, particularly those associated with higher greenhouse gas concentrations. Effective climate risk management often requires closer coordination across regulatory agencies and jurisdictions, as well as more significant changes to regulatory and policy environments, cultural and community resources, economic and financial systems, technology applications, and ecosystems.
Building Capacity through Collaboration and Innovation
Successful adaptation often depends on the support of sustained networks and partnerships among government, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and the private sector. These networks facilitate the sharing of best practices, the development of guidance and tools, and the coordination of stakeholder engagement as new knowledge emerges.
Examples of such collaborative initiatives include the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program, the USDA Climate Hubs, and the Department of the Interior’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs). These regional networks provide data, tools, forecasts, and interpretation to support agencies and communities in building integrated services and coordinating stakeholder engagement.
Additionally, innovative approaches that go beyond mainstreaming, such as assisted migration, wildlife corridors, and planned retreat in coastal areas, are emerging to address the significant changes expected under higher greenhouse gas emission scenarios. However, the implementation of these transformative approaches often faces challenging legal, financial, and equity issues that have yet to be fully resolved.
As the climate continues to change, adapting to new realities will require a combination of mainstreaming climate considerations into existing practices, as well as creating the conditions for more substantial changes to regulatory environments, community resources, economic systems, and ecosystems. By embracing iterative risk management, leveraging collaboration, and pursuing innovative solutions, communities can enhance their resilience and navigate the uncertain future ahead.
