Adapting to a Changing Environment: Confronting the Consequences of Climate Change
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0199754489
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For those who depend on the bounty of the sea for their livelihoods, climate change and its consequences (warming water, coral bleaching, rising sea levels) could spell disaster. The region comprising the eastern coastline of Africa and the islands of the western Indian Ocean--home to many of the Earth's most impoverished people--is particularly vulnerable to significant climate impacts.
Focusing on coral reef fisheries in these areas, which collectively support millions of people, this book provides a tool box of options for confronting the consequences of climate change through building local-scale adaptive capacity and improving the condition of natural resources. This requires strengthening a society's flexibility, assets, learning, and social organizations, as well as restricting or limiting its resource use. These two broad concepts--building social capacity and limiting certain types of resource use--interact in complicated ways, requiring coordinated actions. The authors argue that adaptation solutions are context dependent, determined in part by local resource conditions, human adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change impacts, but also by a people's history, culture, and aspirations.
Providing an up-to-date and original synthesis of environmental stress, natural resources, and the socioeconomics of climate change, Adapting to a Changing Environment develops a framework to provide governments, scientists, managers, and donors with critical information about local context, encouraging the implementation of nuanced actions that reflect local conditions.
Adapting to a Changing Environment to adapt, but these efforts will face considerable challenges from persistent poverty, implementing decisions, corruption, and other prevalent socioeconomic conditions. The challenges of undertaking climate science, making the findings accessible, and catalyzing action are considerable, but this region is where these efforts and responses are most needed. Harsh realities will need to be confronted with decisions that increase the chances for successful
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McClanahan, T. R. Adapting to a changing environment : confronting the consequences of climate change / Tim R. McClanahan and Joshua E. Cinner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-975448-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Climatic changes. 2. Global
central-northern WIO, while high- diversity reefs in the triangle between Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar suffered the least. The results indicate that factors that control regional species richness and climate change responses, measured by coral loss, are probably different. OTHER CHANGES TO THE BENTHOS The impacts of climate change on coral reefs have not been limited to hard corals, but more is known about corals because as the main foundation species, they generate the most scientific
conditions inside these taboo reefs can be significantly improved compared to non-taboo areas (McClanahan et al. 2006, Bartlett et al. 2009). These dynamic temporal closures often find more local support among the community, which can see direct benefits from the closure; benefits from permanent closures are more indirect and difficult to appreciate (Cinner et al. 2005). One of the key questions about temporal restrictions is whether they can provide lasting ecological benefits and contribute to
framework we developed in this book to explore the multidisciplinary aspects of climate change is generic in the sense that it does not necessarily apply just to coral reef ecosystems. This framework can be used to explore different social-ecological systems and types of environmental change at a range of scales. Our hope is that future applications will help societies better confront the consequences of climate change. 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY 154 Aaheim, A., and L. Sygna. 2000. Economic impacts of