ABSTRACT
The potential, and even likely, implications of climate change for ecological and physical systems are profound and disturbing. Social systems that deliver specific management functions and organise governance serve to mediate between these impacts and people at risk. In this way understanding adaptive capacity and action requires a lens that can examine organisational behaviour and governance regimes, as well as the feelings, values and actions of individuals. Perhaps most important are the interactions between different levels of social actor (individuals and organisations) and the institutions that give shape to social systems. Research and policy on adaptation to climate change is just beginning to recognise the full contribution of values and governance to behaviour and action. Work on adaptation is emerging from an early period in its evolution as an intellectual domain where adaptation has, as Nelson (2009) rightly observes, been narrowly framed. Until now the overriding need has been for an articulation of adaptation as a function of climate change impacts (and for some a sub-set of vulnerability). Under the influence of the UNFCCC and IPCC this has in turn required but not quite achieved a clear definition. Adaptation, though, has in the process been separated from mitigation and development. As we have seen throughout this book, climate change is affecting socio-ecological systems in many ways. The majority are compound and indirect, and many quite ambiguous, so that it is difficult to imagine science will ever be able to identify the proportion of an expected or past event that is attributable to climate change alone and so precisely what climate change adaptation, narrowly defined, should be.
