How can adaptation efforts be tailored to the varied, specific needs of the chronically poor? With limited reference to the dynamic and multidimensional nature of poverty, the poorest communities are often considered the most vulnerable to climate change. This article unpacks this orthodoxy, highlighting the need for greater understanding of how different dimensions of poverty influence adaptation design and implementation. Targeted efforts to enhance vulnerability reduction and adaptation to climate change can create routes out of poverty. In order to maximise the effectiveness of such efforts, however, a new poverty-centred adaptation research agenda (extending to the household level) is needed.
Adaptation policies have been informed by different sets of ideological drivers, with different implications for engagement with chronic poverty debates. The instrumental effectiveness approach is often used by donors. This uses economic analysis to build a case for adaptation as a cost-effective process of preventing future negative impacts on development investments. The equity and justice approach presents adaptation in poor communities as a necessary response to a problem caused by the richer sections of society across the world.
Both these approaches have paid little attention to the multidimensional nature of chronic poverty. They describe general conditions in which vulnerable people have been able to improve their capacity to manage climate impacts – at most at a community level.
A poverty-centred approach to adaptation will need to ask whether climate change-related vulnerabilities will render poor people’s coping mechanisms inadequate. In addition, however:
- Changes to ecosystems may boost some people’s livelihoods and offer a greater range of environmental assets.
- Increasing streams of adaptation finance, where targeted at the poorest groups and where accompanied by broader institutional strengthening, could help people to move out of chronic poverty.
- Assessing these opportunities to make adaptation effective for the chronically poor will require moving beyond analysis at the community level and focusing on the household. Such a focus will allow increased understanding of the transfer and uptake of adaptive practices and will provide a more nuanced appreciation of how households take decisions about risks based on climate information.
A new research agenda is therefore required to better understand the links between adaptation, poverty and vulnerability. Research on the specific design of institutional support mechanisms, such as social protection, conflict prevention and service delivery must accompany the work on climate change impacts. A new poverty-centred research agenda could also look at the following areas.
- Understanding that vulnerabilities and adaptation options may change according to different poverty categories.
- Investigating the adaptive flexibility of the chronically poor.
- Developing the evidence base for designing adaptation programmes that target different poverty categories.
- Developing a pro-poor adaptation agenda for adoption in future international agreements, particularly to ensure pro-poor adaptation financing.
- Investigating adaptive institutional and legal structures that can respond to current and future climate risks by reducing vulnerabilities of the chronic poor.
- Linking scientific modelling with a deeper understanding of the impacts of climate change on shifting people into and out of poverty.
