By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
This lesson will take us one week to complete. Please refer to the corresponding module in Canvas for specific assignments, deliverables, and due dates.
If you have questions, please feel free to post them to the Ask a Question about the Lesson forum. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help a classmate.
People feel the impacts of climate change in two ways: directly and indirectly (we'll spend all of Lesson 5 looking more closely at direct and indirect impacts on human health):
There are many other ways that climate change affects people and the things they value. We know, for instance, that climate change is increasing the frequencies and intensities of heavy downpours. We also know that climate change is increasing variation in rainfall from year to year. For agriculture, the result of more frequent, more intense downpours is localized crop loss from damage to plants and agricultural infrastructure. Increasing variation in wet and dry years means that, without irrigation, there are greater year-to-year variations in agricultural yields. These findings suggest that the impacts of climate change will create winners and losers in agriculture. All other things being equal, farmers lose when yields decrease because heavy downpours flatten their crops or droughts ravage the countryside; in contrast, farmers win when the localized downpours miss their fields and strike the fields of their competitors. They also win when yields go up because of a moist year. However, the increase in volatility of the weather leads to fewer winners than losers.
Vulnerability refers to the degree to which people or the things they value are susceptible to, or are unable to cope with, the adverse impacts of climate change. Thus, vulnerability determines how severe the impacts of climate change might be.
There are three dimensions of vulnerability to climate change: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
The expression “things they value” not only refers to economic value and wealth, but also to places and to cultural, spiritual, and personal values. In addition, this expression refers to critical physical and social infrastructure, including such physical infrastructure as police, emergency, and health services buildings, communication and transportation networks, public utilities, and schools and daycare centers, and such social infrastructure as extended families, neighborhood watch groups, fraternal organizations, and more. The expression even refers to such factors as economic growth rates and economic vitality. People value some places and things for intrinsic reasons and some because they need them to function successfully in our society.
Some people and the things they value can be highly vulnerable to low-impact climate changes because of high sensitivity or low adaptive capacity, while others can have little vulnerability to even high-impact climate changes because of insensitivity or high adaptive capacity. Climate change will result in highly variable impact patterns because of these variations in vulnerability in time and space.
Focus first on the difference between adaptive capacity in these two scales.
The concept of resilience is important to understanding adaptive capacity to climate change. Resilience refers to the ability of a human system (such as a municipal water system and the community that supports it) to withstand contemporary shocks and to anticipate and plan for future shocks. Resilient systems have the ability to learn from past experiences and to use that knowledge when confronting problems. Systems with high adaptive capacity are therefore resilient and able to reconfigure themselves to deal with climate change. Systems with low adaptive capacity are much less resilient and much more vulnerable to climate change.
We've looked at the components of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity). But, let's try to dig in a bit deeper to find out what influences each of those components. Understanding who is most vulnerable to impacts is pivotal in creating successful adaptation and resiliency plans. The Thomas et al. reading for this week takes a much deeper, more comprehensive dive into the myriad factors associated with vulnerability, but before we jump into that, let's focus on some of the highlights.
The definitions in quotes below come from the IPCC TAR WGII [6] (2001):
Socio-economic status: Let's look at this at a few different geographic scales. In general, people who live in the least-developed countries are most vulnerable to many of the current and expected impacts of climate change. However, this is not at all to say that people living in poverty in the developed world are somehow immune to the impacts of climate change, far from it. Let's take a look at the global scale first.
It is often the case that those people who have contributed the least to causing the climate crisis stands to be the most adversely impacted by its consequences. Those of us who enjoy comfortable, carbon-intensive lives are often more insulated from the impacts.
But even within the confines of a developed country, people experience vulnerability quite differently. The flow chart below, while tailored specifically to human health outcomes, provides a useful framework for contextualizing how the various facets of vulnerability work together to determine the severity with which a person or group of people will experience an impact. As you look at the examples under each of the facets of vulnerability, be thinking about how varied these experiences will be among Americans (as an example). Does the developed world in general (and therefore the US) have a stronger adaptive capacity than other places? Absolutely. But, do certain segments of the American population have a weaker adaptive capacity than others? Also absolutely.
Health: The infirm, either through age (very young or very old), illness, or handicap are far more sensitive and have a lower adaptive capacity despite what could be modest exposure. In other words, an impact that might not harm a healthy person could be quite consequential for a sick one.
"Climate change is happening now and to all of us. No country or community is immune. And, as is always the case, the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit." UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres (March 2019). See Secretary General Guterres' full remarks [12].
Climate justice is the idea that responding to climate change isn't simply about reducing our emissions and ensuring we've elevated our beach houses to withstand stronger storm surges. Climate justice represents an opportunity to address deep-seated social inequities that increase vulnerability to climate change among some people and recognizes our collective responsibility to those who are most vulnerable. The Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice [13] organizes this into the following principles:
Basically, let's make the world a better place for everyone who is here now and who will come after us. Think for a moment about the Fridays for Future [14] movement led by Greta Thunberg. Here, we're seeing a demand for intergenerational justice - the kids are demanding the adults work aggressively to fix a problem they've created rather than leaving it to the next generation to figure out. The principles listed above (and I do encourage you to go read more about them on the Foundation's website) tie in quite well with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals [15] (which we'll get to in Unit 3 when we turn our attention to responses to climate change).
This lesson is likely the most important we've had this semester. I strongly encourage you to complete the readings thoroughly, follow through on the links provided for additional resources, and really prepare yourself to be thinking about the impacts of climate change and the solutions we'll attempt to employ to address them within this context of vulnerability and climate justice. There could be nothing more relevant to a course on the human dimensions of a changing climate than these foundational topics, and we'll revisit this throughout the remainder of the semester. Understanding how we determine vulnerability and what constitutes a direct vs. indirect impact will be pivotal in your success for the remainder of this course.
You have reached the end of Lesson 4! Double-check the lesson assignments in the corresponding lesson module in Canvas to make sure you have completed all of the tasks listed there.
Links
[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
[2] https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-holding-banner-2561628/
[3] https://www.c2es.org/content/heat-waves-and-climate-change/
[4] https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/community/article223675395.html
[5] http://www.adaptingtorisingtides.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ART_Project_VR_Report_all_sm.pdf
[6] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/WGII_TAR_full_report-2.pdf
[7] https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/bangladesh_climate_vulnerability_profile_jan2013.pdf
[8] https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/those-who-emit-the-least-greenhouse-gases-will-be-hit-the-hardest/
[9] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00632.x
[10] https://health2016.globalchange.gov/populations-concern
[11] https://www.livescience.com/22050-heat-waves-high-death-tolls.html
[12] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2019-03-28/secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-meeting-climate-and-sustainable-development-delivered
[13] https://www.mrfcj.org/principles-of-climate-justice/
[14] https://fridaysforfuture.org/
[15] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/