CET Lunch: What do we talk about when we talk about social limits to adaptation?
Welcome to this CET Lunch seminar with Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Puig, UiB/CET. Daniel will present the main points from a manuscript currently under review, along with the implications of its findings. These findings suggest that risk‑based conceptual framings are poorly suited to research on limits to adaptation — and potentially to many other issues related to climate‑change impacts.
Against a backdrop of dismal progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing effective climate‑change adaptation measures, the idea of ‘limits to adaptation’ is making a rather depressing comeback, twenty years after it was first introduced. With the exception of biophysical barriers, all other constraints on adaptation — and therefore potential limits to it — are socially mediated. This means the range of issues that might constitute a social constraint, barrier, or eventual limit is extremely broad. Unfortunately, research in this area often lacks terminological rigour: many articles that fundamentally concern social constraints to adaptation never actually use that wording. In our study, we use natural‑language‑processing models to identify, across the entire climate‑change adaptation literature, the articles that focus most directly on these issues, regardless of the terminology they employ. We then categorise this subset according to their conceptual framing — such as risk management, governance, human values, and others. We also catalogue all references cited in the two main documents dealing with limits to adaptation — section 16.4 of the WGII contribution to the latest IPCC Assessment Report and the literature review that informed it — classifying each according to its conceptual framing. Compared with the broader body of research, these two documents are biased towards risk‑based framings. This is a concern, as our study shows that risk‑based framings miss several issues that are central to social limits to adaptation, and therefore to any effort to overcome these limits.
About the speaker
Daniel Puig is a researcher at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation. He works on social limits to climate change adaptation and non-economic loss and damage, with a particular focus on how climate change affects intangible cultural heritage.