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Proposes a resilience perspective towards more successful livelihoods transformations in the face of climate change
Introduction
The growing scientific consensus that the climate is changing (IPCC, 2007) reinforces the importance of timely action to both mitigate its causes and adapt to its unavoidable effects. However, worldwide action on climate change remains sluggish. In less developed countries, action has been constrained by multiple competing challenges including uneven economic growth, rapid urbanization, debt, entrenched poverty and threats to food security. In developed countries, entrenched vested interests, negotiation of cost distribution, political debate and economic incentives limit action. Climate change adds to the economic development and environmental governance dilemmas that all countries face. In what ways, we ask, are societies really prepared to cope with the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead? Although a rich body of literature examines many of the relevant issues pertaining to the 'environment-development' challenge, we propose that a more significant paradigm shift is necessary.
Some suggest that there is nothing new about climate change or the way that people and societies adapt to change over time. However, climate change coupled with increasing scarcity of essential ecological resources, and increasing disparities between rich and poor in some regions of the world are unprecedented, with far reaching consequences for the world's most vulnerable societies. Furthermore, scientists are concerned with the gamut of climate changes, including the threats from rapid or abrupt change and the increasing intensity of frequent extreme events such as tropical cyclones and slow onset changes such as sea level rise, which is likely to impact low lying islands and coastal regions. Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to experience the impacts of multiple stressors such as simultaneous droughts and floods, with serious consequences for food security.
Despite some promising policy directions, including the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes and the UN Millennium Development Goals, which aim to focus on delivering sustainable development to the most vulnerable (World Bank, 2000; UN, 2005), development still falls short of delivering in practice. Government and agencies still have some way to go in rigorously identifying the most vulnerable people in society and implementing the most appropriate strategies to reduce their vulnerability (Miller et al. , 2008). Despite the shift from macro development interventions alone to a twin...