Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 54, January 2019, Pages 160-171
Global Environmental Change

Adapting and coping with climate change in temperate forests

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.10.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • I found evidence of adaptation to climate change among individual forest owners.

  • Forest owners exhibited autonomous, reactive, and incremental responses.

  • Forest owners also exhibited planned and proactive responses.

  • Forest owners sought to transition to new conditions and be resilient to change.

  • Adaptation research and policy should account for scales of stressors and responses.

Abstract

A growing body of research documents how individuals respond to local impacts of global climate change and a range of policy efforts aim to help individuals reduce their exposure and improve their livelihoods despite these stressors. Yet there is still limited understanding of how to determine whether and how adaptation is occurring. Through qualitative analysis of focus group interviews, I evaluated individual behavioral responses to local forest stressors that can arguably be linked to global climate change among landowners in the Upper Midwest, USA. I found that landowner responses were planned as well as autonomous, more proactive than reactive, incremental rather than transformational, and aimed at being resilient to change and transitioning to new conditions, rather than resisting change alone. Many of the landowners’ responses can be considered forms of adaptation, rather than coping, because they were aimed at moderating and avoiding harm on long time horizons in anticipation of change. These findings stand in contrast to the short-term, reactive, and incremental responses that current socio-psychological theories of adaptation suggest are more typical at the individual level. This study contributes to scientific understanding of how to evaluate behavioral adaptation to climate change and differentiate it from coping, which is necessary for developing conceptually rigorous analytical frameworks to guide research and policy.

Introduction

As society increasingly recognizes the need to learn to live with the effects of climate change, researchers and practitioners seek to better understand adaptation across all levels of social organization (Adger et al., 2009; Moser, 2010). Adaptation among individuals, including members of households and extended families, is especially important because it is the level at which people most directly experience environmental change and engage in behavioral change. However, it is generally assumed that, without policy interventions, adaptation does not readily occur in a planned, proactive, and transformational fashion among individuals because individuals tend to respond incrementally to environmental changes that are of immediate concern and personal relevance and that they perceive themselves as being capable of addressing (Grothmann and Patt, 2005; Adger et al., 2009; Berrang-Ford et al., 2011; Ford et al., 2011; Gifford et al., 2011; Moser and Dilling, 2004). Climate change, on the other hand, is a complex long-term phenomenon consisting of interacting local, regional, and global conditions and processes that individuals are typically unsure how to address.

A growing body of research seeks to better understand behavioral response to climate change (i.e., at the level of individuals), and a variety of policy efforts aim to help individuals reduce their exposure and improve their livelihoods in spite of adverse impacts. However, these scholarly and practical efforts are constrained by a lack of conceptually rigorous frameworks for evaluating whether and how adaptation occurs. Although, in theory, individual adaptation refers to the process by which people make long-term behavioral adjustments to reduce the adverse impacts of experienced or anticipated change and to maintain or increase their suitability to the environment (Smit et al., 1999; Sober, 1993; Fankhauser et al., 1999; Adger et al., 2005; Field et al., 2014), in practice, the term adaptation is used to refer to a wide variety of short- and long-term behavioral responses without regard for outcomes (Fazey et al., 2010). In some cases, the responses that scholars and policymakers refer to as “adaptations” may be more aptly termed “coping”—short term, reactive efforts enacted quickly to ward off immediate impacts (Smit and Wandel, 2006; Blaikie et al., 1994; Birkmann, 2011)—or even “maladaptation,” in which efforts to adapt have the unintended result of increasing the vulnerability of others (Barnett and O’Neill, 2010; Juhola et al., 2016).

It is important to systematically characterize people’s responses to climate change and to distinguish between adaptation and coping because doing so makes it possible to evaluate policy and societal progress toward learning to live and thrive, despite change (Adger et al., 2005; Ford and Berrang-Ford, 2016). For example, in developed nations, where technology and infrastructure buffer individuals from many climate change impacts, incentive- and capacity-building programs may be needed to reduce the psychological distance of climate change and catalyze action (Adger et al., 2009; Wolf and Moser, 2011; Fankhauser et al., 1999). Policy initiatives that conflate coping with adaptation may be inefficient and potentially even counterproductive because they can foster short-term, temporary adjustments rather than enduring behavioral change. Despite the need for a better understanding of adaptation among individuals, empirical research on individual adaptation is limited. As of 2011, only 11 empirical research papers had reported on individual adaptation actions (Berrang-Ford et al., 2011; Ford et al., 2011), and as of 2018, it appears that few additional papers have been published.

This empirical research paper aims to improve scientific understanding of how individuals respond to climate change and how adaptation responses differ from coping responses. I investigated how individual landowners adjust their forest management behaviors in response to local forest stressors that are arguably linked to global climate change and how their responses exhibit key elements of adaptation behavior according to published typologies for classifying generic types of adaptation and distinguishing between adaptation and coping (e.g., (Fankhauser et al., 1999; Smit et al., 2000). The findings provide insight into how conceptually rigorous analytical frameworks can inform evaluations of whether and how adaptation occurs at the individual level.

Section snippets

Characterizing adaptation behavior

A number of typologies have been developed for classifying generic types of adaptation and distinguishing between adaptation and coping (e.g., Fankhauser et al. (1999); Smit et al. (2000); Birkmann (2011); Burton et al. (1993); Klein (2003). These typologies characterize adaptation behavior on three dimensions: purposefulness, timing, and scope. Regarding purposefulness, adaptation can be autonomous, at one extreme, or planned, at the other. Autonomous adaptation entails the spontaneous or

Research questions and objectives

This study builds on the growing body of empirical research and theory that seeks to improve our understanding of whether and how individuals adapt to climate change. In particular, I investigated how to characterize behavioral responses to the local impact of global climate change on forests and how to distinguish adaptation from coping. Focusing on individual landowners in the temperate forest biome, I pursued three research questions:

  • 1

    How have forest landowners adjusted their forest

How have landowners adjusted their forest management behaviors?

The landowners in the study responded to the changes in their forests, or forest stressors, by undertaking 13 primary management practices, grouped into four categories based on the broad types of activities they entailed: harvesting, planting, engineering, and planning (Table 2). They undertook these practices as part of seven different strategies, grouped into two categories: strategies for managing ecological conditions and processes (i.e., nature) and strategies for managing risk (Table 2).

Discussion

This study’s findings contribute to scientific understanding of behavioral adaptation to climate change. They expand on a small but growing body of empirical research on individual adaptation to local stressors that can be linked to global climate change, including a limited number of studies on individual adaptation in the context of forests. In particular, this study advances approaches to investigating adaptation behavior by applying a conceptually rigorous framework to analyze empirical

Conclusion

The difficulty of assessing whether and how adaptation occurs is an ongoing constraint to designing policies and programs and evaluating their effectiveness (Burton and May 2004). This study suggests that applying a conceptually rigorous analytical framework to empirical data about target group behavioral responses to climate change could provide important information about whether and how people are adapting. By characterizing people’s responses to local stressors using emergent categories of

Funding sources

This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture McIntire-Stennis Program [1011135], USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, University of Michigan Energy Institute, and University of Michigan Graham Sustainability Institute.

Acknowledgements

I thank Michal Russo and Garrett Powers for helping plan, conduct, transcribe, and summarize the focus group interviews. University of Michigan Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Makayla Marshal and Brandon Arbuckle also helped transcribe and summarize the focus groups. Mike Reichenbach, Mark Randolph, Matt Watkeys, Diane Bomer, Valerie Damstra, Gloria Erickson, Nicole Butler, and Tyler Wood hosted and helped recruit participants in the focus groups. Mike Reichenbach, Mike Smalligan, Kris Tiles,

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