Find resources on how to design adaptation interventions that incorporate and address the Domains of Impact.
A review of eight U.S. buyout programs suggests that buyouts, as practiced, lack transparency, which may increase public distrust of the process and reduce participation.
Date: 02/10/23
A case study of the health and social impacts of flooding in Carlisle, UK, in 2005
Date: 02/10/23
A review of literature incorporating public participation and citizen engagement in climate change adaptation since 1992 reveals lexical, temporal, and spatial distribution dynamics of research on the topic.
Date: 02/10/23
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Koslov et al. (2021) draw attention to instances where supported relocation can be beneficial. Their study on the impact of buyout schemes on the mental health of people affected by Hurricane Sandy shows that rebuilding can lead to higher levels of stress compared to those who were financially supported to move elsewhere. Importantly, they show how the type of support offered and the process of relocation has implications for the success of these adaptation strategies. Leadership, co-management and participatory processes in relocation projects have also been demonstrated to matter for broader community resilience in new settlements. For example, work by Jamshed et al. (2018) in Pakistan following the extensive floods of 2010 show that NGO led relocation resulted in better community outcomes compared to plans led by government agencies. Ajibade et al.’s (2022) review of managed retreat programmes emphasises that plans based on equity and justice predict better outcomes for relocated populations than those based on efficiency based metrics.
Financial mechanisms, such as insurance can support a living-with-risk approach enabling people to stay in place when threatened with flood risk and to recover after a disaster event. When insurance mechanisms are present they can support responses to flood risk, both proactively in providing a sense of security and in the recovery period by providing for the financial cost of repairs. This is suggestive of the importance of insurance companies’ roles in shaping health and wellbeing in climate adaptation, and identifiable as an area where processes could be designed to lessen negative mental health impacts.
A study of public responses in Hokkaido, for example, documents the desire for local communities to resist concrete structures, and the potential to integrate different types of adaptation strategies that reflect concerns about wellbeing and allowing the sightline of the sea to remain. Similarly, populations that had to evacuate following the tsunami had better levels of mental health when they were relocated to areas where forests were part of coastal defences compared to those located near concrete infrastructure
Nurhidayah and McIlgorm (2019) show that in Indonesia the legal framework for adaptation to sea level rise does not fully acknowledge the burden of adapting on communities, they suggest that a more inclusive social justice approach is needed increasing involvement of local people in adaptation planning to improve adaptation outcomes.
Clarke et al., highlight the importance of incorporating place-based identities into adaptation planning and consultation for wellbeing outcomes and the wider sustainability of interventions.
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