From Risk to Resilience: Exploring the potential of ecosystem-based adaptation to deliver social and ecological co-benefits

Abstract

For those most vulnerable to climate change risks, comprehensive climate adaptation interventions that improve well-being are urgently needed. The likely failure of nations to achieve less than 1.5° warming above pre-industrial levels necessitates significant adaptation initiatives. However, these interventions often focus on costly built infrastructure rather than approaching adaptation from a social-ecological systems perspective that takes into account – and takes advantage of – the feedbacks between nature and society. Ecosystem-based adaptation uses ecosystem services to help human communities adapt to climate change, with potential co-benefits including increased well-being and reduced inequality, and increased biodiversity richness. Yet greater understanding is still needed regarding project efficacy. I examine ecosystem-based adaptation at multiple scales; exploring challenges to programming at the institutional level, and using a case study of project implementation in the Mt. Elgon region of Uganda to explore potential gender equity and biodiversity conservation co-benefits. The institutional-level results indicate that ecosystem-based adaptation programming is subject to the same challenges omnipresent in the broader conservation and development fields – including siloed programming, constrained funding, and scale mismatches. In terms project co-benefits, programs often recognize the necessity of incorporating women into decision-making processes, however there is also a need to address the social and structural causes of gendered vulnerabilities on the local level in order to increase community resilience. Lastly, by using the ecosystem services framework to examine project outcomes relating to wildlife, I conclude that ecosystem-based adaptation programs have the potential to deliver conservation co-benefits, but project interventions must account for ecosystem disservices relating to wildlife. These case study results show that while ecosystem-based adaptation co-benefits are possible to achieve, they are not guaranteed. Taken together, this research underscores the need to take a social-ecological system-level approach to program implementation and evaluation, address interconnected social issues at the core of individual-level climate vulnerability, and include local needs, voices, and knowledge in ecosystem-based adaptation project interventions.