Does Adaptive Management of Natural Resources Enhance Resilience to Climate Change

By E. Tompkins, W. Adger. 2004

1,205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emerging insights from adaptive and community-based resource management suggest that building resilience into both human and ecological systems is an effective way to cope with environmental change characterized by future surprises or unknowable risks. We argue that these emerging insights have implications for policies and strategies for responding to climate change. We review perspectives on collective action for natural resource management to inform understanding of climate response capacity. We demonstrate the importance of social learning, specifically in relation to the acceptance of strategies that build social and ecological resilience. Societies and communities dependent on natural resources need to enhance their capacity to adapt to the impacts of future climate change, particularly when such impacts could lie outside their experienced coping range. This argument is illustrated by an example of present-day collective action for community-based coastal management in Trinidad and Tobago. The case demonstrates that community-based management enhances adaptive capacity in two ways: by building networks that are important for coping with extreme events and by retaining the resilience of the underpinning resources and ecological systems

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a782a2a4b9a83170e6bac02a2bf8681022e53c54

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Citations in the corpus

How resilient are farming households and communities to a changing climate in Africa? A gender-based perspective (2015, background): “This means that building resilience is key because it makes it possible for a system to deal with surprising and unexpected stress (Tompkins and Adger, 2004).”
Adaptive capacity: exploring the research frontier (2017, background): “There are indeed many studies of responses to current or past stresses as a proxy to understand adaptation, which suggest that adaptation practices arise from far more nuanced and relational processes in which stocks of assets are not the only or the most important explanatory variable.(5,44,45) Som”
Social Learning and Water Resources Management (2007, background): “A similar argument was made by Tompkins and Adger (2004).”
Network Structure, Diversity, and Proactive Resilience Building: a Response to Tompkins and Adger (2005, background): “A good mix of bonding and bridging networks will, as suggested by Tompkins and Adger (2004), lead to greater resilience and an increased ability to adapt.”
Entrenchment or Enhancement: Could Climate Change Adaptation Help to Reduce Chronic Poverty? (2009, background): “More recently, there has been increasing examination of resilience as a concept applicable to both ecological and social systems (Adger 2000; Gallopin 2006; Tompkins and Adger 2004; www.steps-centre.org; www.resalliance.org).”
Insight, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Shooting the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems (2006, background): “Tompkins and Adger (2004) argue that the ability to link different networks makes it easier to avoid following the customary response paths and facilitates flexible learning-based management.”
The governance of adaptation: choices, reasons, and effects. Introduction to the Special Feature (2016, neutral): “See, for instance, Tompkins and Adger (2004).”
A framework for urban climate resilience (2012, background): “Social learning should be an essential element of the integration process because of its importance in adaptation and building a shared understanding of complex issues under uncertainty (Huntjens et al., 2012; Parson & Clark, 1995; Pelling, High, Dearing, & Smith, 2008; Tompkins & Adger, 2004).”
Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change: challenges and pathways for an action-oriented research agenda for middle-income and low-income countries (2010, background): “Research addressing disasters and climate change suggests that effective vulnerability reduction requires going beyond current development efforts, adopting a two-tiered approach involving both direct action on reducing disaster risk and fundamental reform of economic and sociopolitical structures t”