IPCC Report.pdf - Adam Curry

Toward a Sustainable and Resilient FutureChapter 8short- and long-term goals is access to technology and maintenance ofinfrastructure. An example is the introduction of water reuse technologies,which have been developed in a few countries, which could bring agreat improvement in the management of droughts if they could bedisseminated in many developing countries (Metcalf & Eddy, 2005).Money and technology are not enough to implement efficient disasterrisk reduction and adaptation strategies. Indeed, differences inresources cannot explain the differences in exposure and vulnerabilityamong regions (Nicholls et al., 2008). Governance capacities and theinadequacy of and lack of synergy between institutional and legislativearrangements for disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation,and poverty reduction are also as much a part of the problem as theshortage of resources. Institutional and legal environments and politicalwill are important, as illustrated by the difference in risk managementin various regions of the world (Pelling and Holloway, 2006). In manycountries disaster risk management and adaptation to climate changemeasures are overseen by different institutional structures (see Section1.1.3). This is explained by the historical evolution of both approaches.Disaster risk management originated from humanitarian assistanceefforts, evolving from localized, specific response measures to preventivemeasures, which seek to address the broader environmental andsocioeconomic aspects of vulnerability that are responsible for turninga hazard into a disaster in terms of human and/or economic losses.Within countries, disaster risk management efforts are often coordinatedby civil defense agencies, while measures to adapt to climate changeare usually developed by environment ministries. Responding to climatechange was originally more of a top-down process, where advances inscientific research led to international policy discussions and frameworks.While the different institutional structures may represent an initialcoordination challenge, the converging focus on vulnerability reductionrepresents an opportunity for managing disaster and climate risks morecomprehensively within the development context (Sperling and Szekely,2005). A change in the culture of public administration toward creativepartnerships between national and local governments and empoweredcommunities has been found in some cases to dramatically reduce costs(Dodman et al., 2008).In addition to the barriers described above, there is also a tendency forindividuals and groups to focus on the short-run and to ignore lowprobability,high-impact events. The following studies discuss some ofthe psychological and economic barriers shaping how people makedecisions under uncertainty:• Underestimation of the risk: Even when individuals are aware ofthe risks, they often underestimate the likelihood of the eventoccurring (Smith and McCarty, 2006). This bias can be amplified bynatural variability (Pielke Jr. et al., 2008), where there is expertdisagreement, and where there is uncertainty. Magat et al. (1987),Camerer and Kunreuther (1989), and Hogarth and Kunreuther(1995), for example, provide considerable empirical evidence thatindividuals do not seek information on probabilities in makingtheir decisions.• Budget constraints: If there is a high upfront cost associated withinvesting in adaptation measures, individuals will often focus onshort-run financial goals rather than on the potential long-termbenefits in the form of reduced risks (Kunreuther et al., 1978;Thaler, 1999).• Difficulties in making tradeoffs: Individuals are also not skilled inmaking tradeoffs between costs and benefits of these measures,which requires comparing the upfront costs of the measure withthe expected discounted benefits in the form of loss reduction overtime (Slovic, 1987).• Procrastination: Individuals are observed to defer choosingbetween ambiguous choices (Tversky and Shafir, 1992; Trope andLiberman, 2003).• Samaritan’s dilemma: Anticipated availability of post-disastersupport can undermine self-reliance when there are no incentivesfor risk reduction (Burby et al., 1991).• Politician’s dilemma: Time delays between public investment inrisk reduction and benefits when hazards are infrequent, and thepolitical invisibility of successful risk reduction can be pressures fora ‘not in my term of office’ attitude that leads to inaction (Michel-Kerjan, 2008).Work in West and East Africa has shown that rural communities tend tounderestimate external forces that influence their region whileoverestimating their own response capacity (Enfors et al., 2008;Tschakert et al., 2010). Misjudging external drivers may be explained bythe low degree of control people feel they have over these drivers,resulting in reactions that range from powerlessness to denial. Anotherissue that makes it difficult to reconcile short- and long-term goalsarises from the challenges in projecting the long-term climate andcorresponding risks (see Section 3.2.3). Examples of this challenge arereflected in the demographic growth of Florida in the 1970s and 1980s,which unfolded during a period of low hurricane activity but mayexpose larger populations to the risks associated with extreme climateand weather events. Major engineering projects with long lead timesfrom planning to implementation have difficulty factoring in climatechange futures, and have instead been planned according to historichazard risk (Pielke Jr. et al., 2008). Managing natural risks and adaptingto climate change requires anticipating how natural hazards willchange over the next decades, but uncertainty about climate changeand natural variability is a significant obstacle to such anticipation(Reeder et al., 2009).Climate change is typically viewed as a slow-onset, multigenerationalproblem. Consequently, individuals, governments, and businesses havebeen slow to invest in adaptation measures. Research in South Asia showsthat in those regions where past development had prioritized short-termgains over long-term resilience, agricultural productivity is in declinebecause of drought and groundwater depletion, rural indebtedness isincreasing, and households are sliding into poverty with particularlyinsidious consequences for women, who face the brunt of nutritionaldeprivation as a result (Moench et al., 2003; Moench and Dixit, 2007).Connecting short- and long-term perspectives is thus seen as critical to452