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Should adaptation be a distinct field of science?

Over the past few months, I have had the pleasure of editing the Viewpoint article appearing in this issue, ‘Climate adaptation research for the next generation’ (Mustelin et al., 2013). The authors of that paper argue that climate adaptation has become so expansive and so important, that young scientists entering the field need particular support in particular ways, in order to do their job well. Most of all, they argue, we need to improve training and support for multiand trans-disciplinary research. As a part of this, we need to harmonize the language and terminology used across the various fields that contribute to adaptation, and we need a better way of collecting and disseminating information on best practices. The authors’ concluding words, to me, ring true: ‘Adaptation science challenges our conventional disciplinary approaches and in order to enable a new generation of adaptation scientists to advance their contributions to solving tomorrow’s problems, we need to focus on expanding the support they need’. But this sentence also got me thinking. What if the practice of adaptation can best advance not if there is a growing group of researchers concentrating on it as a unique field of study, but rather if the practice benefits from the contributions of a wider set of researchers, most of whom are primarily concerned with other areas of nature and the human experience, but who every so often bring their expertise to bear on the subject of how changes in the climate and in human systems can go hand in hand? In short, what if adaptation isn’t really a very good science of its own? I suppose that this is a radical thought, particularly coming from an Associate Editor of this journal. To frame why I increasingly believe it, however, I would like to describe an idea that came to me as I was preparing for a presentation to a group of PhD students, several months ago. The talk was on how to communicate uncertainty about future climate, in order to aid adaptation decision-making. I had given similar talks before, always suggesting the importance of participatory communication practices between climate modellers and stakeholders. My epiphany this time, however, was that about 99% of the time it is completely unnecessary to do a good job communicating uncertainty in future climate – beyond simply stating that it is highly uncertain – because about 99% of the time, people’s adaptation decisions simply aren’t at all sensitive to what future climate will bring. It is an argument similar to what Suraje Dessai and his co-authors have developed in a number of papers (Dessai & Hulme, 2004, 2007; Dessai, Hulme, Lempert, & Pielke, 2009). Building higher dikes in places where dikes are already present, like the Netherlands, represents the other 1%, which rather than being a good paradigm for how adaptation operates and why it is needed, is actually a highly distracting red herring. Alright, that last sentence was even more radical. However, the fact is that there are three basic types of activity that we typically use the word ‘adaptation’ to describe. The first of these is preparing for a particular future climate that is different from the climate we have now. The second is reducing people’s vulnerability to whatever climate they get, primarily by improving their adaptive capacity. The third is correcting existing maladaptations, ways in which people don’t do as good a job as they could at managing existing climate risks, or matching their lives to the existing weather. While we use words to suggest that it is the first of these – anticipatory action based on a predicted future climate – that captures the real heart and soul of adaptation, in all my years of doing research I have seen examples of it exceedingly infrequently, the Dutch dikes being the best example. Everywhere else, uncertainties about socio-economic development, as well as changes in human values, make it impossible to estimate preparatory adaptation’s future benefits. With no estimate of future benefits, it is really hard to justify taking actions to make people in the present worse off, which is what adapting to a climate that exists only in the future implies. Hence, the adaptations that we do in fact see, for good reason, are those of the second and third varieties: implementing innovations that correct existing maladaptation, and improving people’s adaptive (or one could also say ‘innovative’) capacity. That is fine. Both of these are extremely worthy goals. But then, research to improve the practice of adaptation is really very much about innovation, and very little about climate change. It is about testing whether innovations are practical and valuable, about understanding what makes people more likely to innovate in the first place, and what they need in order to put their innovations into practice. Moreover, it is this theme of innovation that connects climate adaptation to every single social science, systems science, and engineering discipline out there. In all of these disciplines, there are things to be learned about innovation – about coming up with, evaluating, and implementing new ideas – from the whole range of human experience, from playing chess, to building schools, to making dinner, to driving cars.