Proactive Planning for Resilience: Protocols for Community-Led Climate Adaptation in Virginia
Adaptation Pathways
The Adaptation Pathways approach serves as an alternative to more traditional ‘predict-and-plan’ approaches to climate change adaptation. The approach has become a broad term encompassing plans with various focuses, but is defined by constant monitoring and evaluating before making decisions on what actions to take.¹ Rather than creating a static plan, this approach focuses on the constant evaluation of progressively implemented strategies based on current and future circumstances.² It allows for different future possibilities, rather than relying on the outcome of static vulnerability assessments, and can be used to address immediate and long-term concerns. It is more flexible in its timeline of implementation, as it relies on employing a strategy when it becomes necessary rather than on specific dates; and it avoids the implementation of adaptation measures that may become ineffective sooner than predicted.
Scholars have identified five broad activities important to the creation of an adaptation plan:³
- Objective and ideal outcome definition
- Knowledge of the current situation
- Analysis of possible futures, complete with vulnerability assessments and applicable strategies
- Development of different pathways, where the actions and strategies trigger the next once the previous becomes ineffective
- Implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and change as needed
The most important contributor to the success of an Adaptation Pathway approach is the accurate monitoring and evaluation of factors that determine when to set a threshold and then use a strategy. These thresholds and strategies should be determined by the community, but strategies do not need to be predetermined and it may be beneficial to instead develop a list of possible alternatives. They can be based on anything important to a community that can be measured, such as a certain increase in daily tide levels or the number of times per month transit is affected by flooding. They can also be based on demographic or socio-economic measurements in the area, as these factors greatly affect how a community is impacted and can change over time.
When thresholds are determined, they can be evaluated for possible triggers or signposts that indicate they are about to be reached. These will be the main spurs of change. Many Adaptation Pathways plans refer to tipping points interchangeably as thresholds or triggers. These points indicate that the current management strategies are no longer sufficient and the next strategy, which already should have been decided ahead of time, is needed. In order to see these coming, there is often a step before it which is referred to as a signpost, indicator, or signal. These are meant to occur before a threshold is reached and indicate that the next strategy will need to be ready to implement when a threshold is reached. While a community may not be able to define tipping points for themselves at the present moment, most Adaptation Pathways approaches address this challenge by setting clear thresholds based on measurable metrics. If a community is having trouble scientifically defining an exact range of impacts that are acceptable to them, it is possible for them to describe an impact they would likely experience and find a close analog that can be measured, either in demographic or scientific change. For example, when creating an adaptation plan for the township of Lakes Entrance in South-Eastern Australia, the second trigger was determined as the occurrence of two 1.8 meter floods in a single year. This was chosen due to the community members describing the second trigger as a negative impact on business, tourist arrivals, employment, elderly people, and access to medical services for nearby communities, which would be connected to this level of flooding.4
A benefit of the Adaptation Pathways strategy is that it can make the process of adapting to climate change more gradual, without the need for communities to make all the necessary decisions for the future in the present moment. Instead, it allows for careful and long-term consideration that can create more forward-thinking solutions. If the situation may eventually call for a managed retreat, the Adaptation Pathways approach builds in time for community members to plan for this.
The Vulnerability, Consequences, and Adaptation Planning Scenarios (VCAPS) tool can be helpful when pursuing an adaptation pathways approach because it supports converting environmental outcomes to social and economic outcomes for local decision makers. The resulting resilience plans also include diagrams of causal pathways, similar to the flow of an adaptation pathways plan. For an example, see the case reports from the process here.
Case Studies
California’s Adaptation Planning Guide provides guidance to localities in planning for climate adaptation and resilience. State guidance breaks adaptation planning into four distinct phases.5 Phase 1 is dedicated to setting the scope of the adaptation planning process by establishing definitions, assessing capacity and needs, assembling the project team, and beginning outreach. Phase 2 is the vulnerability assessment for the community to identify the hazards to be addressed by the plan. Phase 3 includes the formation of an adaptation framework and the identification of strategies which will be relevant throughout the plan. Phase 4 is the actual program implementation, with emphasis on adjustment as needed primarily based on community feedback. The Adaptation Pathways approach is one way suggested by the State to move through these phases and create an action plan. If using this approach, localities do not need to commit to certain strategies on a specific timeline and instead allow changing conditions to guide decision making.
In order to develop a useful list of strategies for Phase 3 under the Adaptation Pathways approach, there are four steps outlined in the California plan. First, stakeholders must narrow the definition of the impact to be addressed and decide what a successful outcome would be with respect to this impact. Hopefully, narrowing the scope and definition of both the problem and objective will alleviate some of the uncertainty. The second is identifying a range of strategies that could be used to create this outcome. It is important to have variance among the strategies in cost, duration, and impact, with flexibility for the climate scenario they address. The third is the evaluation and organization of that range of identified strategies based on their benefits, costs, ease of implementation, and longevity of effectiveness through a feasibility assessment. Each strategy must have a designated point where it has lost its effectiveness to signal the need to choose another strategy. Finally, the compatibility of all these strategies should be assessed together.6
For more information, see the California Adaptation Planning Guide website and the Adaptation Pathways Explainer.
In September of 2012, New York City established the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) to address the threat posed by climate change. The City’s ‘flexible adaptation’ strategy included developing and implementing successive strategies to address the effects of climate change, where the acceptable risk levels are re-evaluated over time to determine the path forward. Similar to other Adaptation Pathways plans, it balances short-term projections and goals with building long-term resiliency through the establishment of monitoring mechanisms and wide-scale incorporation of climate science. For New York City, a tipping point came just one month after formation of the NPCC, in the form of Hurricane Sandy. While not explicitly caused by climate change, the flooding and destruction of the storm greatly lowered residents’ level of acceptable risk as they experienced tangible damages. As a result, the NPCC incorporated lessons learned into their future plans and were able to adjust the adaptation strategies being pursued. Before the tipping point created by Hurricane Sandy, adaptation strategies had mainly focused on avoiding disruptions to current systems. This changed as a result of the Category 3 hurricane, when residents experienced severe flooding that the stormwater system was unable to handle, prompting major updates to infrastructure systems. Hurricane Sandy’s role as a tipping point demonstrates that Adaptation Pathways approaches can change along with public perception of risk.
For more information on the effect of Hurricane Sandy on New York City’s adaptation planning, see this 2014 study. To read more about the NPCC, visit their website and the 2019 special report on Flexible Adaptation Pathways by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Endnotes
¹Saskia Werners et al., “Adaptation Pathways: A Review of Approaches and a Learning Framework,” Environmental Science & Policy, 116 (February 2021): 266–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.11.003.
²Ibid.
³Karyn Bosomworth and Estelle Gaillard. “Engaging with Uncertainty and Ambiguity through Participatory ‘Adaptive Pathways’ Approaches: Scoping the Literature,” Environmental Research Letters 14, no. 9 (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab3095.
4 Jon Barnett, et al., “A local coastal adaptation pathway,” Nature Climate Change, 4, (2014): p.1103–1108. doi: 10.1038/nclimate2383
5 Resilient California, “Adaptation Planning Guide,” https://resilientca.org/apg/
6 Resilient California, “Adaptation Pathways,” https://resilientca.org/apg/adaptation-pathways/