ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the UK Climate Impacts Programme’s problematization of adaptation to climate change, which both responds to and helps shape a discursive “environment” through which adaptation to climate change is understood. It also discusses the extent to which this might be characterized in terms of human security. Although human security is often said to be threatened by climate change as a biophysical phenomenon (Barnett and Adger, 2007), the understanding of climate change as a threat is discursively produced (Shackley and Wynne, 1995; Demeritt, 2001, 2006; Szerszynski, 2010), as is our understanding of security in relation to it (Campbell, 1998; Dalby, 2002; Feindt and Oels, 2005; O’Brien et al., 2007). As such, rather than directly negotiating the changes in the biophysical environment, humans understand and respond to environmental change, including climate change, through discourse.
