3. Decision making frameworks for adaptation - top-down vs bottom-up
<p>Dessai and van der Sluijs, Uncertainty and Climate Change Adaptation. Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development and Innovation. 2007.</p>
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Figure 3.1. “Top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches used to inform adaptation to climate change (from Dessai and Hulme 2004).</p>
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relevant text in doc:
We argue that two main schools of thought have emerged on how to deal with climate change uncertainty in adaptation under which the various decision analysis frameworks can fit into. One school of thought is prediction oriented. It argues that if there is uncertainty about climate change then uncertainty needs to be characterised, reduced, managed and
communicated. This leads to an ever increasing sophistication of modelling tools and techniques to describe future climates and impacts. This school of thought emanates from conventional public policy analysis, decision analysis, the risk analysis literature and the IPCC to some extent.
The other school of thought is resilience oriented. They accept that some uncertainties associated with climate change are irreducible, therefore they emphasise learning from past events. “Learning to live with uncertainty requires building a memory of past events, abandoning the notion of stability, expecting the unexpected, and increasing the capability to learn from crisis” (Berkes 2007). This thinking comes from the fields of societal and policy learning, adaptive management for natural resources, and complex adaptive systems research.
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