Delayed, abrupt and unjust: An institutionalist perspective on limits to climate change adaptation

Abstract

An actor-centred, risk-based framework for analysing limits to the capacity to adapt to climate change impacts, developed in the context of IPCC AR5 (Dow et al,. 2013b), was refined in the IPCC AR6 reports (Mechler et al., 2020; O’Neill et al., 2022; Thomas et al., 2021). In this paper, we centre the analysis on how institutional contexts shape and influence adaptation limits as experienced by social actors. We emphasise institutions’ stability over time leading to delayed adaptation, their role in protecting more powerful rather than weaker social interests, and their tendency to generate punctuated rather than smooth changes in vulnerability to climate risks. We illustrate these arguments with two case studies of socio-ecological institutional regimes facing adaptation limits: water resources management in the Colorado River Basin; and disaster risk management in The Bahamas. These represent divergent risk governance contexts generating limits to adaptation for multiple social actors, despite the availability of plausible adaptation pathways. Our aim is to contribute to a generalisable approach to adaptation limits which can be applied in identifying and assessing critical choices in responses to growing climate change impacts.