The process of planning an adaptation intervention will always differ between contexts. However, there are three guiding principles which should always be applied in any adaptation planning process.
Expertise on health and wellbeing is often missing from decision-making about climate change adaptation, despite advances in research and understanding. Space is needed for different types of knowledge, especially local knowledge and expertise, to inform effective decision-making. Successful adaptation processes will need to create space for qualitative data and narratives from affected communities.
An important precursor to building legitimate and just solutions for adapting to climate risk involves identifying and prioritising those who are most at risk, either due to more direct potential exposure or existing vulnerabilities and marginalisation. There is a need to recognise how the sources and content of information about climate change risks are received by individuals and social groups and shape their experiences.
The responsibility, capacities, and incentives for institutions and agencies designing adaptation interventions to incorporate wellbeing metrics remain patchy. The generation of information on wellbeing consequences, and public consultation on design elements that take on board contextual and local knowledge are often perceived as expensive and risky for such organisations. To incentivise wellbeing information being captured and incorporated into adaptation design may require changes to high level policy objectives that make it more central to specific policy goals.
Where populations and infrastructure are moved from present locations to new lower-risk locations, either individually or as communities, with the objective of long-term sustainability.
The construction and siting of flood walls, levees, defences and drainage systems to prevent floodwater inundation in identified flood zones.
Adaptations from the household to catchment scale that increase resilience to flood risk and improve the ability to recover. It involves building capacity in advance and remedial actions to minimise impact, including flood proofing homes, nature-based approaches, forecasting and warning, insurance, development control and health and social services.
Find definitions for terms that are frequently used in the Healthy Adaptations Hub.
| Terminology | Definition |
|---|---|
| Affect | People’s emotional evaluation of experiences of everyday life. Affective responses to flood interventions are important for understanding the social consequences of adaptations and how these are distributed. Affective responses are also important for galvanising support for adaptation policies because of the way people can influence how they interpret social situations and their intended and actual behaviours. |
| Affective wellbeing | People’s emotional evaluation of everyday life experiences in terms of their preferences versus reality. |
| Place making | [Definition to come] |
The Healthy Adaptations project was undertaken by a team of social scientists, health economists, demographers and hydrologists at the University of Exeter, Maynooth University and the University of Ghana. You can get in touch with the Healthy Adaptations Team at healthyadaptions.org@
The project aimed to develop an evaluation tool for sustainable adaptation that comprehensively incorporates the health and wellbeing consequences of specific adaptation interventions, focusing on flood risk adaptation. Flooding is treated as one of the major climate driven risks given that it causes high levels of mortality globally every year, and has multiple and interacting health dimensions and outcomes. Across the climate change adaptation literature, there is often a focus on singular aspects of how interventions shape wellbeing (e.g. nature connection, mental health, etc.). Far less is understood about the ways in which multiple dimensions of people’s lives are affected by adaptation processes with knock-on consequences for wellbeing outcomes. There is thus a need for deeper understanding of the extent to which different areas of life, referred to in the Healthy Adaptations Hub as ‘Domains of Impact’, are impacted by climate adaptations.
Over the course of the project, the research team framed their analysis around three principal forms of flood adaptation: planned relocation, hard engineering, and living with risk. The team tested and validated new evaluative criteria in the context of real world interventions currently being implemented in Ireland, Ghana, and the UK, working with resident communities, public health and flood risk management practitioners across the three case study locations.
The Healthy Adaptations project established three Expert Panels corresponding to the case study locations:
Ghana
Ireland
UK