Free Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation by Mark Pelling Page B

predictors of decreased psychological stress during post-disaster relocation (Spence
et al.
, 2007), with spirituality particularly significant for older African American Katrina evacuees (Lawson and Thomas, 2007). In a comparison of psychological resilience pre-and post-Katrina, Kessler
et al.
(2006) found reduced thoughts of suicide after the disaster in survivors expressing faith in their ability to rebuild their life and a realisation of inner strength. This is important in providing an empirical link for adaptation, between internal processes of belief, identity and self-worth and external actions, in this sad case illustrated through suicide rates. Outside the US, following the 2003 earthquake in Guatemala, feelings of self-control and self-assurance were also found associated with adaptation outcomes of ‘successful survivors’ who reconceptualised the crises as opportunities for acquiring new skills (Vazquez
et al.
, 2005). This work provides one approach for promoting a progressive response to climate change through acknowledging the interplay of social and psychological root causes (Moos, 2002), but this has yet to be systematically applied (Zamani
et al.
, 2006). It provides an initial evidence baseto begin a characterisation of specific psychological orientations associated with adaptation and linking interior and exterior expressions of adaptation, taking us closer to gaining some leverage on the ways in which individuals and social collectives might move between different cognitive, emotional and potentially intellectual states; the latter opening scope for the study of shifts between ‘adaptive man’ and critical consciousness or first, second and third loop learning.
    In order to incorporate deeper levels of change while retaining close links to the existing literature adaptation to climate change is defined here as: The process through which an actor is able to reflect upon and enact change in root and proximate causes of risk.
    This formulation sees coping as the range of actions currently being enacted in response to a specific hazard context. These are made possible by existing coping capacity (which may extend beyond the range of coping acts observed at any one time). Adaptation describes the process of reflection and potentially of material change in the structures, values and behaviours that constrain coping capacity and its translation into action. Coping then is an expression of past rounds of adaptation. Both adaptation and coping will unfold simultaneously and continuously in shaping human–environment relations, they will interact and on the ground they may be hard to separate as reflection and application occur hand-in-hand. Still, from an analytical perspective and for policy formulation there is a value in distinguishing these two components of human–environment relations.
    The coproduction of vulnerability/security by coping and adaptation brings the possibility that adapting to climate change can undermine as well as strengthen capacities and actions directed at coping with contemporary climate related risks. Coping may be limited for longer-term gain or a result of ignorance or injustice in the implementation of adaptation. This can be seen in the loss of income accepted by low-income families who are able to provide an education for their children. This is an adaptive action that constrains contemporary coping capacity, but with the aim of providing future gains that will provide the means for better family wellbeing including capacity to cope with uncertainty and shocks associated with the climate change. More likely, the immediacy of political life will produce a tendency for coping that distracts from or undermines the critical reflection and long-term view of adaptation. The danger is that coping is felt to be sufficient so that the potentially difficult questions and changes in development that adaptation might bring are temporarily evaded. At the scale of large social systems,