Climate change, coral reefs, and social capital

[ashling]

http://blog.oup.com/2012/06/climate-change-coral-reefs-and-social-capital/

Building adaptive capacity will require strengthening a society’s assets, flexibility, learning, and social organizations. The ways of doing this are diverse and will of course depend on existing local capacities and needs. Economic development plans most frequently focus on the short-term accumulation of assets, which can often come at the price of sustaining resources. Therefore other aspects have been emphasized for long-term solutions. Improving the condition of resources generally requires restricting or limiting society’s actions. In fisheries, these limits could be the time that people can fish, the gear they can use, and the sizes and species they can capture. These two broad concepts — building social capacities and limiting certain types of resource use — interact in complicated ways that create both challenges and opportunities for adaptation.

One of the central themes of social-ecological science has been that adaptation solutions are context dependent: not only aspects of local resource conditions, adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change impacts, but also people’s history, culture, and aspirations. Decades of experience in international development have shown that local involvement doesn’t guarantee the success of development projects, but ignoring people’s ideas and capacities regularly leads to failure. On the other hand, although local involvement and context are critical, they are likely insufficient on their own for successful resource governance or climate change adaptation. Policies and programs at the local level must be supported on national and international scales. Where these larger scale linkages are missing, local actions can often be futile.