Introduction

The MEDIATION Adaptation Task Navigator provides guidance on assessing climate change vulnerability, impacts and adaptation (VIA) as well as on implementing, monitoring and evaluating adaptation. This encompasses a wide range of activities addressed by a diversity of methods. While many previous guidances have focused on particular aspects of these activities, this guidance presents a novel approach to integrating these activities into a coherent framework.

The guidance focuses on assessing vulnerability and impacts in the context of adaptation. This is of particular importance to note because the methodological guidance on how to assess impacts and vulnerability is thus embedded into the wider picture of addressing adaptation problems and advancing adaptation. Impact assessment carried out for other purposes such as for setting mitigation targets are not considered. This guidance provides insight both in identifying which methods are appropriate within these general stages of the adaptation, and in applying specific methods once the appropriate ones have been identified.

Vulnerability, it should be noted, is a contested concept. Assessing vulnerability might mean anything from projecting impacts to analysing institutions. The concept thus is not a useful one for giving methodological guidance and we attempt to use it as little as possible. When we use the concept of vulnerability, we use it in an intuitive sense without attempting to give it a precise meaning.

The MEDIATION ATN emphasises the diversity of adaptation situations considered as well as the diversity of approaches and methods needed. In order to select appropriate methods for VIA, a series of methodological choices must be made. This guidance presents criteria that guide the reader through these choices, which can be described in each adaptation situation. Further, the important criteria to consider differ at each stage, and thus different decision-trees have been constructed within each general stage of the adaptation learning cycle.

It is important to point out that this is a guidance and not a guideline. Assessing VIA and implementing Adaptation is complex. There are no panaceas and this will not give a comprehensive answer to all issues involved. The ATN does however help to structure the widely diverse activities that make up VIA, and provides a coherent and integrated structure for addressing them.

What's the difference here ?

A diversity of methods is available, but there is little guidance on which method is appropriate in a given situation. There is a lot of fragmented thinking about VIA and this documents attempts to puts these together. Existing guidance focuses on particular aspects of VIA. The IPCC Technical Guidelines focus primarily on impacts (IPCC, 1994), risk management frameworks on (formal) decision making (Jones, 2001; Jones and Preston, 2010), community-based guidelines on building adaptive capacity (Provention Consortium, 2006). This guidance integrates these different approaches through the decision trees embedded in each of the general stages of adaptation. It thus goes beyond previous guidances by bringing together insights from these very different framings of adaptation into one coherent framework.

It is also important to point out that this guidance is also oriented towards overcoming barriers to adaptation, although a slightly different language is used here. Much recent literature has emphasised the need to both recognise and overcome barriers to adaptation (e.g. Adger et al., 2009; Moser and Ekstrom, 2010). It should be clear to the reader that addressing a critical task identified in this guidance is broadly similar to overcoming a barrier as the stages of the adaptation learning cycle are traversed. Thus, this guidance helps to overcome barriers to adaptation, by identifying those specific to a given stage and selecting the methods to apply in order to overcome them.

Many of the barriers to adaptation described in the literature refer to those problems which prevent adaptation action and implementation on the ground. Thus, although a barrier may occur in the phase of "understanding" (Moser and Ekstrom, 2010), it is important to emphasise that this is not a barrier to carrying out an assessment of vulnerability and impacts, but rather a barrier to acting. Moser and Ekstrom's (2010) diagnostic framework for identifying barriers to planned adaptation, a prominent example from this literature, focuses on identifying barriers that arise at each stage preventing the process of planned adaptation from moving forward. Many of these barriers are described in this guidance as critical tasks to be addressed. Overcoming a barrier will allow a the process of planned adaptation to move forward. Similarly, addressing a critical task will move the process of adaptation forward to the identification of the next task, and towards further stages in the adaptation learning cycle.

To take an example, Moser and Ekstrom describe aspects of the governance system potentially preventing understanding of a problem as presenting barriers to adaptation. This guidance points the reader to an identification of such a barrier to action and to the methods both to understand the barrier better and to overcome them. Further methods, such as those of behavioural or institutional analysis, or participatory methods can be applied in the context of this guidance with the goal of understanding and overcoming, in this case, the identified capacity related barrier. In this sense, a decision tree that identifies a critical task to be addressed performs a similar function to a framework that identifies barriers to adaptation.

Recognising barriers throughout the process

There are however other barriers which are applicable at all stages of the adaptation learning cycle, and may even prevent a critical task from being addressed or an appropriate method from being applied in an effective manner. There are several 'cross-cutting' barriers which recur at various stages in the adaptation cycle (Moser and Ekstrom, 2010). These include a lack of leadership, resources, communication, information and the impact of differing values and beliefs in achieving objectives. In addition to barriers identified at each stage of the adaptation cycle (ibid.), cross-cutting barriers which appear in many adaptation problems, are important to consider when choosing methods and tasks to apply in different contexts. Whilst awareness of the existence of possible barriers will not guarantee an effective adaptation process, it can usefully inform how methods are applied and potentially improve the results that are achieved.

What is key at all stages of the adaptation cycle is that actors much have sufficient knowledge, awareness, skill and financial resources to be able to carry out the methods associated with each task. This in itself could prove to be the challenge that requires the most investment in time to prepare enough for 'policy windows of opportunity' when they do emerge (Moser and Ekstrom, 2010).