Gina’s dissertation contributed to understanding and monitoring autonomous adaptation in order to inform the UNFCCC’s Global Stocktake process for tracking progress towards the Global Goal on Adaptation. Because adaptation is a multi-faceted, subjective, and locally-driven process, this leads to many conceptual, methodological, and informational challenges for tracking progress, especially at the global level. The first section of her PhD reviewed a global dataset of adaptation responses from peer-reviewed literature in order to map and examine the process, prevalence, and interaction of autonomous (self-organized) and planned (institutional or top-down) adaptation. Gina and her co-authors find a high prevalence of autonomous and ‘mixed’ adaptation (where autonomous and planned adaptation interact), calling for a better inclusion of these types of adaptation responses in the Global Stocktake.
Building on this result, the second and third section of her PhD explored methods for understanding and monitoring autonomous adaptation, using a case study of coffee in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The second section uses a household panel survey to explore how adaptive capacity manifests at the household level, with a focus on harmonizing inconsistent definitions of adaptive capacity through acknowledgement of multiple outcomes: proactive versus reaction, towards long-term climate change versus weather shocks. The results demonstrate that while some determinants of adaptive capacity (both subjective and asset-based) related uniformly across outcomes, other manifest heterogeneously in magnitude and direction, some, with an inverse relationship to what theory expects. This calls for a better acknowledgement of the intended outcome when quantifying adaptive capacity. Lastly, the third section of Gina’s PhD pilots a scalable remote sensing method for mapping coffee production systems (monocropped v. intercropped coffee), and more broadly plantation and agroforestry systems, as well as presents a coffee map for a major world coffee-growing region: Dak Lak, Vietnam. This provides a first use case of monitoring autonomous adaptation response to climate change, offering a method that can be scaled temporally, and with care, spatially.
Gina’s thesis is made up of three publications:
- Dichotomy or Continuum? A global review of the interaction between autonomous and planned adaptations. Maskell G.*, Shukla R*., Jagannathan K.*, Browne K.*, et al. [submitted to Ecology & Society] *shared equal first authorship
- Clarifying determinants and outcomes of adaptive capacity using a household panel dataset in a coffee growing region. Maskell G., Shukla R., Murken L., Nguyen T., Weituschat C.S., Gornott C., [submitted to Climate & Development]
- Integration of Sentinel optical and radar data for mapping smallholder coffee production system in Vietnam. Maskell G., Chemura A., Nguyen H., Gornott C.*, Mondal P.* Remote Sensing of the Environment 266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112709 *shared equal last authorship
