Last year, I shared a select few essays from my time as an MA student at King’s College London in 2023(MA International Political Economy). I have decided to publish the remainder of those essays now on my blog.

This essay was the final piece for a module outside of the IPE programme, taken instead with the international development department. It is an extremely short essay, which challenged my ability to go into sufficient depth, but I tried my best. My thanks goes to Dr. Nithya Natarajan for facilitating the course.

As the world enters a stage of irreversible anthropogenic climate change, the predominant political response has become one of ‘climate adaptation’. Assuming the IPCC definition of climate adaptation, this essay analyses what scope adaptation has to address the impacts of climate change across an unevenly developed world. A theoretical discussion of adaptation is presented, where shortfalls in its core logic are identified. The essay adopts a postcolonial approach to expose the unequally distributed threats of climate change globally. It explores a case study of climate change risk in the Caribbean, drawing on the emerging literature of ‘precarity’ within a climate context. It then questions to what extent adaptation approaches meaningfully account for the global north-south divide.

Defining and contesting climate adaptation

Human adaptation to climate is nothing new. Historically transformative technologies such as irrigation and weather forecasting highlight how we have always innovated in response to specific environmental conditions. Yet adapting to climate conditions and adapting to climate change are different matters (Adger et al, 2009). The latter is the concern of ‘climate adaptation’.

The IPCC defines climate adaptation as follows: “In human systems, the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities” (IPCC, 2018). The IPCC differentiates between two forms of adaptation, incremental and transformational. The former “maintains the essence and integrity of a system or process at a given scale”, while the latter “changes the fundamental attributes of a socioecological system in anticipation of climate change and its impacts” (IPCC, 2018).

Some implications of the IPCC definition are important to highlight. Attributed to human systems, adaptation becomes a societal matter, prioritising people over nature. It is not concerned directly with ecology as a whole, but secondarily in its necessity for sustaining human society. Not all the literature is so dismissive of the symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth (Foster, 2000; Ingold, 2000; Taylor, 2015). The explicit separation from nature is significant, as it risks separating response from material reality, and legitimises approaches that underplay ecology.

Adaptation implies a status quo approach utilising the economic and social structures we currently have, even as it promotes structural change. This is the logical implication of incremental adaptation. In attempting to ‘maintain integrity of a system’, it limits space for radical change. Larger scale transformational adaptation thus becomes a product of the existing system. Adaption is often used to reproduce growth-led development without questioning whether it is a reasonable response to climate change (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013).

This becomes problematic in how climate adaptation and existing development paradigms are used to justify each other. The IPCC argues that sustainable development enables the societal transformation necessary to limit global warming. It enables adaption to support and coincide with poverty alleviation (IPCC, 2018).

This standpoint is contestable. Development certainly better enables transformation, some of which is likely to mitigate climate effects. But in attempting to ‘catch up’, the structures which have brought us to the brink of climate disaster are pushed further. If it were possible to ensure sufficient growth to enable developing countries to lead their own innovation-led adaptation practices without pushing the world too far over an ecological tipping point, this would be logical.

It is unlikely. The development gap between global north and south is still huge (Chang, 2003; Margulis, 2017) and predictions from the Global Footprint Network suggest that we would require nearly 4 earths to support that level of GDP growth-oriented development (Global Footprint Network). Yet the development of the global south – most of the world – is presented as key to the solution (IPCC, 2012; IPCC, 2018; Stern, 2006). Then comes the matter of time, of which we are critically short. Development, even in its most damaging forms, does not happen overnight.

The critical literature on climate politics voices various concerns with the adaptation approach. These critiques generally revolve around distributive issues – the uneven impacts of climate change and how prevailing adaptation approaches overlook it. This can lead to ‘maladaptation’, where a disconnect develops between specific community needs and one-size-fits-all adaptation solutions applied to them (Antwi-Agyei et al, 2018; Eriksen et al, 2021; Juhola et al, 2016). One of the least appreciated aspects of maladaptation is the implications for culture – on one hand the threat to culture itself, and on the other how culture affects community response to climate change (Adger et al, 2012.).

Escobar (1995) shows how the promise of development through international organisation programmes in the third world ended up creating the opposite -resulting in poverty and exploitation instead. The process of development as we know it began from the end of the Second World War, as the western colonial era came to a close. The very framing of development in terms of a first and third world and the need to “un-undevelop”, highlights the power dominance retained by western countries.

Adaption discourse treats development and climate politics as a combined issue. This results in climate politics toting the same colonial structures as development, in practice prioritising the macro climate policies that favour developed countries. Yet this need not be the case, as bottom-up climate responses can have global impact (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013) and are likely necessary to account for the shortfalls in adaptation logic.

Precarity – a reframing of adaptation

Having explored the shortfalls in the logic of adaptation, this section considers how the emerging literature of ‘precarity’ may serve us better in organising climate discourse than the adaptation paradigm.

Ettlinger (2007) and Waite’s (2009) conceptualisations of precarity are from the perspective of geographical studies but are readily applied to development and climate questions with a reorientation of focus. Waite states that “referring to life worlds characterised by uncertainty and insecurity, the term precarity is double-edged as it implies both a condition and a possible rallying point for resistance” (Waite, 2009).

‘Adaptation’ removes the sense of insecurity while depoliticising community agency – the ‘rallying point for resistance’ in Waite’s definition. The semantic assumptions of the term ‘adaptation’ downgrade the relevance of human community, removing not only agency but also a sense of urgency. With the process of change depoliticised, it falls on the international organisations, community voice and action diminishing. Though not the purpose of her article, this insight highlights that mainstream adaption approaches are not points of political resistance. It is rather a diffuser of resistance, a one-size-fits-all method blind to variation in climate impact – blind to precarity.

Terminology matters. Relying on Gibson-Graham’s (2003) ‘ontology-building’ method, Waite (2009) points to how amending widely accepted vocabulary can shift the framing of questions and thus the answers we form. In political discourse ontology-building serves to reconstruct the politically formed base of terminology. ‘Adaptation’ was coined not only for understanding, but also for specific interests. The same is true for ‘precarity’, but each orients discourse to a different focal point. This is of central importance to our goal of assessing how ‘meaningful’ the adaptation approach is to addressing climate change.

Ettlinger (2007) warns of the “untidy geographies of precarity”. She argues that uncertainty is not only a result of precarity but is an intrinsic element of humankind. Reminiscent of Watts (1954), a compulsion for stability in face of uncertainty fuels it instead. We must be wary of essentialising communities facing precarity, as doing so “legitimizes constructed boundaries (…) eliminating difference and possibilities for negotiation” (Ettlinger, 2007).

Ettlinger’s position is challenging for meaningfully analysing precarious communities. It damningly problematises the IPCC adaptation method, which heavily universalises the climate response, but the question also arises whether a concept of communities facing precarity is also essentialised.

This is perhaps pushing Ettlinger’s logic too far. She concludes that everyone faces precarity, but on a spectrum of ‘dimensions of precarity’ (Ettlinger, 2007). From this perspective, Waite’s (2009) ‘precariat’ (migrant labour living precariously due to low wage labour and deregulated labour markets) can be understood as migrant worker communities who live more precariously than others. Cambodian farmers-turn-brick-workers detailed by Natarajan (et al, 2019) are likewise seen as an example of this.

Having considered how adaption relates to precarity, it is necessary to ensure this interaction remains ecologically oriented if it is to be applied to climate politics. Precarity is in itself no conceptualisation of climate, but rather climate change produces systems of precarity. Taylor (2015) presents a reframing of adaptation that – in giving agency to communities – links precarity to ecology. Instead of asking how climate change makes rural communities vulnerable, ask “how do we make climate so powerful?” (Taylor, 2015).

Debt precarity in the Caribbean

This section draws on the preceding theoretical comparison of adaptation and precarity to analyse the climate response in the Caribbean. Colonial history has shaped the development of the region, limiting its economic power. The same imperialistic forces that led to the region’s uneven development are the source of its ecological precarity now, as the former colonial states became the drivers of climate change off the expropriated wealth of the colonies (Sealey-Huggins, 2017).

Conditions within the Caribbean vary greatly, but are characterised by rising sea levels, increasingly unstable weather conditions forcing both prolonged droughts and extreme rain, and ecosystem degradation including acidification of the ocean (Sealey-Huggins, 2017).

The macro view of mainstream adaptation fails to fully grasp the specific pressures on island states, or at least chooses to ignore them. The Paris Agreement (UNFCC, 2015) set targets to limit global temperature increases by no more than 2 degrees, but the Caribbean Climate Change Center (CCCC) argues that only under 1.5 degrees would Caribbean states be able to manage climate change (CCCC, 2017).

The combination of predicted economic effects and ecological pressures of climate change places particular pressure on the small island states of the Caribbean. This is in the context of limited responsibility for climate change, having emitted approximately only 0.16% of global Co2 emissions (Benjamin, 2010). Costs to the Caribbean economy inflicted by climate change is estimated to reach USD 22 billion annually by 2050. This represented 10% of GDP in 2004 (Benjamin, 2010).

In line with the Stern Review (2006), Benjamin (2010) argues that ‘strong and early mitigation’ is the only option available for tackling the challenges facing the Caribbean. Mitigation however requires funds, and severe indebtedness – with its roots in the colonial era – forces Caribbean states into dependency on wealthier nations (Sealey-Huggins, 2017).

Debt is a key driver of precarity (Natarajan et al, 2019) and is rife at both national and community level in former colonised states. New global power structures have emerged through it (Schwartz, 2019; Bracking, 2015) and some argue that global debt relations represent a ‘new imperialism’ (Foster, 2015).

As is clear in the Caribbean, debt precarity is one of the strongest barriers to the effectiveness of adaptation in the global south. Not only do such states becomes dependent on their creditors, they also must rely on them acting on their climate commitments. The carbon offsetting principles set out in the Stern Review (Stern, 2006) highlight how difficult this is. The carbon credit financial system is in place to transfer funds from wealthy to developing nations, but in practice it simply allows developed countries to ‘pay off’ their emissions and continue polluting, in a process Sealey-Huggins (2017) coins the “imperialist underpinnings of carbon offsetting practices”.

This issue highlights two points: Firstly, the question of how to ensure wealthy countries pull their weight in material, productive terms rather than shifting their burden to the future through financial products; and Secondly, the importance of bringing the role of community agency forwards in climate politics – marking a shift from the adaption paradigm to precarity.

Conclusion

This essay attempted to highlight key issues with the climate adaptation paradigm through a post-colonial lens. From a theoretical perspective, it identified three shortfalls: an implicit separation from nature itself; the issue of relying on the same system that that created the climate crisis; and critically its depoliticised nature which marginalises the experience and response of local communities.

Through a case study of the Caribbean, this essay explored how adaptation discourse removes agency from communities most at risk of climate change. While the political response to climate remains oriented around finance measures and financing technological fixes, finance must be readily available to the most affected countries. However, debt structures rooted in colonial heritage remove the possibility of this and force dependency on the global north. The depoliticising power of adaptation discourse enables this process. As such, this essay promotes the agency-building terminology of ‘precarity’ to inform a more equitable climate politics in the future.

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