ABSTRACT
In recent years, adaptation has emerged as an important concern of climate policy. A growing interest in adaptation reflects recognition of the fact that despite mitigation efforts people all over the world struggle to cope with a rapidly changing environment. In comparison to the well-defined causal factors addressed by mitigation policies (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions), adaptation strategies respond to a variety of challenges that may only to a limited degree be seen as relating to climate change. In many cases, environmental changes are embedded in a long history of social, technical, and political changes. Whereas multi-national actors such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change emphasize the importance of adapting to the local effects of anthropogenic warming, “climate impacts” may not appear as such a distinct category to local actors. Indeed, the most pressing local environmental hazards may be perceived as only marginally caused by climate change, if linked to them at all (Pielke et al. 2007). This evokes questions of how people come to understand and engage with their immediate environment in terms of climate change. How, for instance, does a devastating storm in the North Atlantic—a region notorious for its storminess—become understood as a consequence of climate change? Such a framing of local environments and events as climate change is not self-evident. It is a result of a social process that—like other forms of globalization—can be traced empirically.
