Mitigation will not be sufficient for us to avoid climate change and we will need to adapt to its consequences. This book targets the development of adaptation policy in European countries with different relations between central and regional/local government.

This book analyzes how climate change adaptation can be implemented at the community, regional and national level. Featuring a variety of case studies, it illustrates strategies, initiatives and projects currently being implemented across the world. In addition to the challenges faced by communities, cities and regions seeking to cope with climate change phenomena like floods, droughts and other extreme events, the respective chapters cover topics such as the adaptive capacities of water management organizations, biodiversity conservation, and indigenous and climate change adaptation strategies. The book will appeal to a broad readership, from scholars to policymakers, interested in developing strategies for effectively addressing the impacts of climate change.

The Social Aspects of Environmental and Climate Change critically examines the prominence of natural science framing in mainstream climate change research and demonstrates why climate change really is a social issue. The book highlights how assumptions regarding social and cultural systems that are common in sustainability science have impeded progress in understanding environmental and climate change. The author explains how social sciences theory and perspectives provide an understanding of institutional dynamics including issues of scale, possibilities for learning, and stakeholder interaction, using specific case studies to illustrate this impact. The book highlights the foundational role research into social, political, cultural, behavioural, and economic processes must play if we are to design successful strategies, instruments, and management actions to act on climate change. With pedagogical features such as suggestions for further reading, text boxes, and study questions in each chapter, this book will be an essential resource for students and scholars in sustainability, environmental studies, climate change, and related fields.

This topical and engaging Research Handbook illustrates the variety of research approaches in the field of climate change adaptation policy in order to provide a guide to its social and institutional complexity.

Taken together, the studies show that integration of adaptation in flood risk and emergency management may differ strongly _ not only with risk, but with a number of institutional and contextual factors, including capacities and priorities in the speci

Due to the lack of success in climate change mitigation efforts, the importance of adaptation is becoming more and more apparent and is now one of the main imperatives of international research and action. However, research on adaptation is mostly not directly applicable to adaptation policy or practice, leaving a gap between scientific results and practical advice for decision makers and planners. This book seeks to address this problem and bridge the gap and should provide readers with practical and applicable information on climate change adaptation. Following an introduction, the book is organised into four main sections, each reflecting an essential component in the adaptation process. Climate change adaptation is an emerging subject area and has gained increased political and academic attention within the last decade. Whereas most books in the field focus on adaptation in developing countries, this volume provides an examination of predominantly European policy and offers inter-disciplinary insight into cutting edge knowledge and lessons learnt in a relatively new field of implementation.

The prospect of the adverse effects that global climate change will have on human societies, opened up a discourse about the way adaptation should be managed. In order to finance adaptation measures in the most severe affected countries, the parties of the Kyoto Protocol established the Adaptation Fund in 2007. In view of the limited resources that are available for adaptation, scales for the prioritization of countries that are based on their suspected vulnerability, have been developed in literature. But so far, indicators of vulnerability reflect only the general indicators of human development, and therefore, fail to capture the complex structures of vulnerability. In order to capture the mentioned complexity in a more satisfactory way, this book highlights the theory of collective learning. The collective learning approach assumes that vulnerability can be significantly decreased when governance systems adapt to external changes through collective learning processes. This study connects to this notion, and therefore, it assesses the influence of collective learning processes on the vulnerability of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani society towards flood hazards. This determinant of vulnerability is used to capture the matter's complexity.