HUMAN ADAPTATION TO CLIMATIC VARIABILITY AND CHANGE

Recent developments in both the policy arena and the climate impacts r esearch community point to a growing interest in human adaptation to c limatic variability and change. The importance of adaptation In the cl imate change question is affirmed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Cl imate Change (IPCC) Technical Guidelines for Assessing impacts and Ada ptations and the IPCC's more recent Second Assessment Report. Yet, the nature and processes of human adaptation to climate are poorly unders tood and rarely investigated directly. Most often, human responses of one form or another are simply assumed in impacts research. Analyses t hat do address adaptation use a variety of interpretations and perspec tives resulting in an incomplete, and at inconsistent, understanding o f adaptation to environmental variations. This paper reviews and synth esizes perspectives from an eclectic body or scholarship to develop a framework for characterizing and understanding human adaptation to cli matic variability and change. The framework recognizes the characteris tics of climatic events, the ecological properties of systems which me diate effects, and the distinctions which are possible among different types of adaptation. A classification scheme is proposed for differen tiating adaptation strategies.