So, in the last four weeks, we've looked at vulnerabilities and potential adaptation options within different, what some people call, sectors whether it's water, agriculture, and food, security and in urban settings as well as with regard to biodiversity and ecosystem services. What I want to do now is describe an overall and quite generic adaptation process. Now, there are many tools and wizards and process descriptions that are out there that have been produced by many different organizations and most of them follow a similar set of general principles. One of the first organizations to describe a process like this was the United Kingdom's Climate Impacts Program. The UKCIP as it's known, was one of the first sort of adaptation facilities that was ever established. It was created in the mid 1990s by the UK government to assist a whole range of different stakeholders and actors in the UK to think about adapting to climate change. As part of that process, they created an excellent set of resources for those wanting guides and information, and support on how to go about thinking about adaptation and moving from assessing risk into making serious adaptation plans. One of the tools that they have is what they call the Adaptation Wizard. This is a guided process through five key steps in coming up with an adaptation plan. The five steps which I'll cover in more detail just now are; preparation, assessing current vulnerability, assessing future vulnerability, identifying adaptation options, and then building that into an adaptation strategy and then ongoing monitoring and revision and evolution of the adaptation strategy. Now those five steps look quite simple in theory but in reality each step involves multiple sub-stages and as one moves through the vulnerability assessment into identifying options and designing strategies actually growing data requirements and complexity of the thinking that's needed. From an African perspective, what's quite attractive about the two-step vulnerability approach that's described in this particular adaptation is that it allows an assessment first of all of current vulnerability which if you think back to the African context and some of the quite large adaptation deficits that exist that can prompt thinking about adaptation options that you can implement right now to overcome the adaptation deficit and make a difference today. Then shifting onto looking at future vulnerability, maybe at different times into the future allows you to start thinking about evolving adaptation needs and shifting towards a more anticipatory approach to adaptation once you've dealt with the immediate adaptation deficit. So, within this vulnerability assessment stage of the adaptation process, assessing current vulnerability is relatively simple because you can actually go out and assess the current situation in terms of the factors that make you vulnerable in a particular setting and the ways that the climate is stressing that vulnerability Moving on to future vulnerability, this is where it gets a bit more complex. As you'll have seen through the different weeks of the course, we not only need to understand how climate risks are going to change in the future, but also how other factors that affect vulnerability particularly social and economic and political changes that will be happening at the same time work in combination with climate to change the future vulnerability setting. Once you've identified and assessed your set vulnerability, the next step in the wizard is around identifying and choosing options to reduce that vulnerability, the circled adaptation options. This again, is a major piece of work with multiple steps within it but it should at least involve an exploration of options that have been suggested and implemented by others. So, if you like going out and trying to find out what others have been doing in similar vulnerability contexts so that you can draw on the experience of others. But it might also involve design from scratch. Particularly if the problems that you're facing in your situation are novel or new and haven't been identified or assessed by others in other parts of the country or parts of the world and they may be not be any sort of off the shelf solutions that others have tried that are available so you'll have to go and do a design from scratch about what those options might be. Selection then of potential options. So, is then a whole exercise on itself and we're going to cover possible approaches to selecting different adaptation options in a separate part of this week's lectures. But once you have selected what you think are the right adaptation options, the next step is then to move into implementation. This requires essentially the design of an implementation strategy about how you're going to go ahead and make these adaptation options that you've identified and prioritized actually happen on the ground. This really requires quite careful prioritization. So what should be done first in terms of which options you want to implement first and then how each phase of that implementation might be resourced. So, this involves not only identifying who's going to be responsible for implementing particular parts of the adaptation strategy, but what partnerships are needed, so who else needs to be at the table and also what resources are going to be needed to enable this adaptation process to actually happen. It's important when thinking about adaptation options to also realize that doing nothing or waiting in fear actually perfectly valid options as well. It may be that there isn't enough evidence to suggest an adaptation options going to make a difference right now and so it's much better to not invest in options that have very little guaranteed benefit in the future until maybe more evidence arrives or until you care about an adaptation option that actually will make a difference. The assessment of vulnerability in the present and at different times in the future is very important because it helps you think about the sustainability of the early adaptation options in the longer contexts. So, this dual vulnerability assessment process in an African context allows you to identify the options you want to implement now, then also think about what are those options that you've identified are going to be sustainable over 10 or 20 or 30 years in the context of the evolving vulnerability. So, really having this temporal multi-timescale view on vulnerability really helps you to think across multiple time scales in terms of how your adaptation strategy needs to evolve from actions you have implemented right now to actions that might be implemented in the future. Critical finals or ongoing part of this adaptation process is monitoring and revision of what you're doing. It's recognized by many that adaptation is actually more of a process than a particular intervention and so you need to be continually assessing how what you're doing is working, understanding how the context might be changing in terms of vulnerability or unexpected new climate stressors that are emerging and therefore use this monitoring and revision to have a dynamic iterative process that updates your adaptation plans and what you're doing as new evidence emerges either around climate change or around the ways that you could be doing what you're already doing better. Finally, I want to talk about the preparation part of the adaptation process, that's actually step one in the adaptation wizard. It's really important to take the time to prepare properly for your adaptation process. You need to really understand the resources that are needed to undertake the full process from vulnerability through to assessing options and more importantly, you need to understand what buy-in you need within your organization to be able to have the mandate to go ahead and do this kind of assessment and planning process. For this reason, the stepwise process is also very useful. The early stages of the adaptation process are relatively low cost and it's quite easy for instance to maybe speak to your director and say, "Look climate change might be a problem and we just want to do an initial assessment of what the potential risks are." So, that's kind of the vulnerability assessment stage. Then if you can identify that there are important risks that are going to really have an impact on your organization, you can then have built the case for going to step two of the adaptation process which is looking at future vulnerabilities and then if those turn out to be significant, you can then get into thinking about adaptation options. So, really preparing the overall process and getting that buy-in and the resources you need for each stage of the adaptation process is a critical part of actually having a successful process overall. You can't just do it in an instant, it really needs to be very carefully planned.
