Structural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region

Louisa S Evans; Christina C Hicks; W Neil Adger; Jon Barnett; Allison L Perry; Pedro Fidelman; Renae Tobin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150575

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Structural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region

Journal article

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Structural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region

Louisa S Evans, Christina C Hicks, W Neil Adger, Jon Barnett, Allison L Perry, Pedro Fidelman and Renae Tobin

PLoS One, Vol.11(3), e0150575

2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150575

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Abstract

Adaptation, as a strategy to respond to climate change, has limits: there are conditions under which adaptation strategies fail to alleviate impacts from climate change. Research has primarily focused on identifying absolute bio-physical limits. This paper contributes empirical insight to an emerging literature on the social limits to adaptation. Such limits arise from the ways in which societies perceive, experience and respond to climate change. Using qualitative data from multi-stakeholder workshops and key-informant interviews with representatives of the fisheries and tourism sectors of the Great Barrier Reef region, we identify psycho-social and structural limits associated with key adaptation strategies, and examine how these are perceived as more or less absolute across levels of organisation. We find that actors experience social limits to adaptation when: i) the effort of pursuing a strategy exceeds the benefits of desired adaptation outcomes; ii) the particular strategy does not address the actual source of vulnerability, and; iii) the benefits derived from adaptation are undermined by external factors. We also find that social limits are not necessarily more absolute at higher levels of organisation: respondents perceived considerable opportunities to address some psycho-social limits at the national-international interface, while they considered some social limits at the local and regional levels to be effectively absolute.

Details

Title: Structural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region
Authors: Louisa S Evans (Author) - University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Christina C Hicks (Author) - James Cook University
W Neil Adger (Author) - University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Jon Barnett (Author) - University of Melbourne
Allison L Perry (Author)
Pedro Fidelman (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Arts, Business and Law
Renae Tobin (Author) - James Cook University
Publication details: PLoS One, Vol.11(3), e0150575; 17
Publisher: Public Library of Science
Date published: 2016
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150575
ISSN: 1932-6203
Copyright note: Copyright © 2016 Evans et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Organisation Unit: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Sustainability Research Cluster
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99449110802621
Output Type: Journal article