What Supports Household Adaptation to Climate Change Hazards?

Keywords: social-ecological, Arctic, adaptation, human-environment
Session Type: Virtual Guided Poster Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 63

Abstract

There is a growing globally recognized need for adaptation efforts to reduce the risks posed by climate change impacts through policies and strategies informed by research. Here, adaptation is a cultural process of adjustment owing to individuals and their collective behavior that seek to reduce adverse effects on health and wellbeing and to find opportunities that arise from changes.

This paper investigates how social-ecological systems modeling can analyze climate change adaptation at the household level. First, I draw together human-environment geographies of social-ecological systems, ecosystem services, and sense of place to examine the associations between these social-ecological dynamics and climate change adaptation. I apply this framework to the social-ecological system of North Central Iceland, which is situated in the Arctic.

This paper has 4 main findings. First, there are observed and lasting changes in the local climate characteristics of North Central Iceland. Second, the majority of implemented household adaptations focus on changing consumer practices and improving financial security. Third, 3 social-ecological system variables were most facilitative to households who adopted a greater number of adaptations: 1) feeling concern for future local impacts of climate change, 2) having historical knowledge of ecosystem change, and 3) highly valuing provisioning ecosystem services.