Under the branding slogan “the Adaptation COP,”¹ the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP) promises to prominently feature the issue of climate change adaptation, a variable that for long remained a taboo in global climate change debates. In the midst of the climate crisis and the most significant wave of urban growth in human history, adapting cities to climate change is of critical concern. However, as climate impacts continue to intensify worldwide, questions about the limits to adaptation are being raised. Therefore, mainly from a policy and design perspective, this article: Departs with a brief exploration of the history and policies related to climate adaptation, discusses the potential limits to adaptation in cities while drawing attention to issues of loss and damage and suggests a range of questions and issues that may be informative to both policymakers and spatial designers in future discussions. In doing so, this text traces the factors that may limit adaptation and the issues that delay consensus within the loss and damage debate. In this context, it raises the need to feature voices from a multiplicity of regions and locales more prominently. In support of our argument, two case studies are briefly examined to make the connection to ongoing processes across a range of nation-states, built environments and potential alternative climate futures. From the Pacific Small Island Developing States to the Arctic, the case studies reveal how these regions are already experiencing an inequitable burden of losses and damages compared to their greenhouse gas emissions and contributions to the climate crisis. Taken together, this article resonates with a contemporary design discipline since it fosters constructive discussions about adaptation and loss and damage across different climatic, spatial, and cultural registers. Similarly, it may also propel productive debates at upcoming COP events, including COP 27 in Egypt.

This year, once again, states will gather during the Conference of the Parties to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to evaluate the progress made towards the achievement of the Paris Agreement’s goals and to deliberate on future climate action. The UNFCCC was established in 1994 to avoid “dangerous human interference with the climate system.”² Initially, the Convention focused mainly on mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG), paying limited attention to other issues such as climate change adaptation. For a long time, both scientific and political attention focused on mitigation, while placing adaptation prominently within the political agenda was seen as problematic. Many feared that it would conflict with “the more urgent issue” of mitigation.³ In fact, those who advocated for adaptive strategies were labelled as fatalistic and linked to “do nothing strategies.”⁴ However, the growing evidence that “some form of climate change” would inevitably result from the legacy of the GHG emissions that have been produced over the past century led to changes in the discourse around the mid-2000s.⁵

The increasing understanding of climate-related impacts, the acknowledgement that there is a need to adapt to these and the realisation that this would require significant capital led to the establishment of The Cancun Adaptation Framework of 2010. This mechanism focuses largely on developing contexts through the provision of planning, financial and technical support.⁶ More recently, the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC report calls for more serious adaptation efforts in response to the widening adaptation gap which exists “between current levels of adaptation and levels needed to respond to impacts and reduce climate risks.”⁷ In alignment with this call for action, the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change taking place this year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is raising strong expectations on adaptation and loss and damage, matters that for too long have remained largely ignored.

Within climate negotiations, loss and damage (L&D) is a concept that aims to address the limits to adaptation. The recognition that people and ecosystems may experience these limitations, particularly in developing contexts, led to the establishment of The Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) on loss and damage from climate change in 2013. In the most recent IPCC report (2022), there are four central claims on L&D which are key to this year’s COP in Egypt: (i) The corroboration that “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people” have resulted from “human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events” beyond natural climate variability;⁸ (ii) The acknowledgment that even with effective adaptation “losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits” as global warming rises;⁹ (iii) The fact that the limitation of global warming to around 1.5ºC would “substantially reduce projected losses and damages related to climate change […] but cannot eliminate them all;”¹⁰ and (iv) The acknowledgment that losses and damages are “not comprehensively addressed by current financial, governance and institutional arrangements, particularly in vulnerable developing countries.”¹¹ However, drawing the lines between what can be considered “adaptable to” and what falls “beyond the limits of adaptation” remains a complex task. In exploring the L&D risk space, Mechler and Schinko (2016) distinguish between “tolerable” and “intolerable” risks. Tolerable risk is understood as a risk level that may be adjusted through, for example, infrastructural interventions and ecosystem management, among other ways, which over time and as the frequency or severity of severe disruptive events increase, can become intolerable.¹² Here, intolerable loss arises at “the point at which an actor’s objectives cannot be secured from intolerable risks through adaptive actions.”¹³

Beyond discussing climate adaptation in general terms two case studies, the Pacific Small Island Developing States and the Arctic region, are worth examining in more detail. Both are distinct regions with their own histories and literatures on climate change adaptation. First, the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS), often referred to as being at the frontline of climate change, have attracted significant attention in the climate change discourse: In the media, the international arena, and the academic field, to name a few. Portrayed as “sinking islands,” popular and political perceptions of the Pacific region often characterise it as already lost to a warming climate.¹⁴ Pacific leaders have actively tried to show that they are more than vulnerable nations and communities. The global media has reduced them to "vulnerable" states, in some cases limiting their agency and ability to adapt; this narrative suggests that these are places that will be inevitably lost. In this way, the mobilisation of symbolic forces of the regional islands’ vulnerability has led to trade-offs. While becoming “the world’s moral conscience on climate change,”¹⁵ Pacific Islands have also become experimental spaces expected to provide “proof of a global climate change crisis.”¹⁶ The Pacific Islands have in fact been recurrently labelled as the canary in the coal mine for climate change.¹⁷ Small atoll states in particular (such as Kiribati, Tuvalu, to name a few) face extreme challenges and are certainly threatened by sea level rise and other climate-related hazards. In exploring issues of L&D within the Pacific region, Handmer and Nalau have argued that some Pacific Island states could “already be at the tolerable/intolerable interface.”¹⁸ However, the normalisation of their loss has been raised as a concern, not only because it leads to an ill-conceived type of international aid response,¹⁹ but because it also loads them with the burden of providing proof of the climate crisis globally.²⁰ In these discourses, disappearing islands are regarded as laboratories, where “cosmopolitans enclose a space to locate and contain climate change hopes and anxieties,”²¹ while islanders are denied their own agency. Barnett (2017) argues that if “the idea of the loss of atolls is more than an act of symbolic politics, then it is worth thinking through what this means for contemporary decisions about the future of these societies, and what the institutions of climate change science and policy might do to assist atoll islands to do as they choose.”²²

While the Pacific Islands are often overlooked as areas of urban growth, population growth projections for the Pacific estimate its urban population to double over the next three decades, at a rate well above the global average.²³ Increasingly, a substantial part of the urban population is living in informal settlements. As climate change displaces residents from coasts and rural areas, residents move to the fringes of urban areas, expanding into informal settlements that are often built beyond water, sewer and electric infrastructure. These settlements are often located in hazard prone areas, show high levels of sensitivity (e.g., poor quality housing), and operate outside of the formal and regulatory systems. In these settings, challenges do not only stem from exposure to hazards, but also from underlying spatial inequalities that require local disaggregation for a better understanding of current and potential future risks. To date, climate change planning has remained limited in cities of the PSIDS.²⁴ As issues of adaptation and its limits continue to become more pressing, a better understanding of how science and ideology interact, as well as efforts to better integrate facts and values is critical.²⁵ As highlighted by Fischer, “any attempt to rule out socio-cultural knowledge can only miss a crucial part of the problem.”²⁶ It is important that such issues are considered during negotiations that advance the framing of L&D at international fora such as COP27, in addition to shaping and putting in place associated mechanisms for financial support.

Beyond international conferences on Arctic topics, similar issues are true within the discipline of Arctic urbanisation. Although a “climate-sensitive approach” to “enhance the quality of urban life” in northern cityscapes³³ has been central to many intellectual debates since the 1960s and onward, the discipline has been and is flawed in many ways - not forgetting the “Arctic Architect”³⁴ Ralph Erskine’s “Swedish-British colonial architecture,”³⁵ among many others. As pointed out by Canadian architects Lola Sheppard and Mason White, in the Arctic, “the advent of urbanism” has been “fraught,” because, “throughout the 20th century, Arctic urbanism has been driven by externalities: climatic and technical challenges, economic or military impetus, and the exigencies of efficiency.”³⁶ Several prominent designers and scholars are, however, calling for a new approach to examining Arctic urbanisation which may also include a better, or different, understanding of the limits to climate adaptation in a rapidly changing polar world. For example, architect and scholar Peter Hemmersam argues in his recent book Making the Arctic City: The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North (2021) that the fast-changing Arctic necessitates a “re-conceptualization” of urbanism. He continues, “a reconstituted concept of the Arctic city is open to include a wide variety of different relations between people and the environment, and not be reduced to narrowly focusing on, for instance, local cultural expressions or climate adaptation.”³⁷ Here, Hemmersam may suggest a plural understanding of Arctic urbanisation, and by extension also refers to a broader understanding of how to deal with loss and damage in a complex and diverse urban Arctic. Finally, in such discussions, listening to and empowering local voices is vital. Or, as historian of science Michael Bravo puts it more effectively: “When the ice is gone, commodity prices have fallen, and the corporations have gone, will northern states have ensured that their people have been true beneficiaries, or will the Arctic more closely resemble the abandoned sites marked by loss of biodiversity and contamination in so many other parts of the world?”³⁸ Overall, the rapid unfolding of climate change across the Arctic region has had, and will have, significant implications on Arctic cities, towns, and settlements. Effectively, discussions on loss and damage should play a more prominent role within the literature on, and practice of, Arctic Urbanization.

In conclusion, as touched upon above, the Pacific Small Island Developing States and the Arctic are two unique regions with their own approaches toward and framings of climate adaptation. Distilled from the literature referenced above, the following suggests a range of issues and open questions that may be informative to both policymakers and spatial designers in future debates. First, we call for a more nuanced conversation around L&D where issues of climate justice are placed at the centre of the debate. This includes adequately capturing and responding to the needs of the PSIDS and the Arctic region, and avoiding discourses that depict them as “lost causes.'' Second, we suggest that it is relevant to make more connections between the PSIDS and the Arctic region, since both places are portrayed as canaries in the coalmine, already showing evidence of irreversible impacts on the built and natural environment. This demands an emphasis on foregrounding the perceptions of local populations within international debates and design projects. Third, moving on to risks, a few questions that should be addressed more prominently: Who gets to decide what is a tolerable and intolerable risk? Within such discussions, how can we strengthen the emphasis on local values, histories and perspectives? How do we start addressing issues of tolerable and intolerable risk through the lens of design? In other words, we question how to reduce vulnerability through alternative design strategies while reflecting the values of PSIDS and Arctic peoples and what they understand to be important to protect. Fourth, it is important to be critical about who dominates the literature on the above topics. In the Arctic, outsiders have dominated the narrative on Arctic urbanisation and, by extension, also its (intellectual) relation to climatic changes, adaptation, and loss in the Circumpolar North. Similarly, the combination of sparse urban expertise and the prevalence of “fly-in, fly-out” humanitarian experts in PSIDS has often resulted in a dominance of external views within the climate change adaptation and disaster risk planning domains.Finally, in addition to underscoring the timeliness of the topic, this essay can be considered an open invitation to continue tracing the limits of climate adaptation, and the implications these have for the design disciplines.

Notes

1 Benzie, “How The ‘Adaptation COP’ Serves To Build Systemic Resilience, Will Determine Its Success.” UN Climate Summit (blog) (2022).
2 UNFCCC, “What Is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change?”
3 Biesbroek and Lesnikowski, “The Neglected Dimension of Polycentric Climate Governance?” In Governing Climate Change: Polycentricity in Action?, 303–19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
4 Schipper, “Conceptual History of Adaptation in the UNFCCC Process” In Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 15 (1): 82–92 (2006).
5 Bulkeley, Cities and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2012).
6 UNFCCC, “The Cancun Agreements”
7 IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” In H.-O.Pörtner, D.C.Roberts, E.S.Poloczanska, K.Mintenbeck, M.Tignor, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem (eds.) Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 22.
8 Ibid. 11
9 Ibid. 28
10 IIbid. 15
11 Idem. 28
12 Handmer and Nalau, “Understanding Loss and Damage in Pacific Small Island Developing States” In Loss and Damage from Climate Change: Concepts, Methods and Policy Options. Climate Risk Management, Policy and Governance Book Series (CRMPG). (NYC: Springer International Publishing, 2019).
13 Dow, Berkhout, and Preston, “Limits to Adaptation to Climate Change: A Risk Approach” In Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 5 (3–4): 384–91 (2013).
14 Barnett, “The Dilemmas of Normalising Losses from Climate Change: Towards Hope for Pacific Atoll Countries”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 58 (1): 3–13.
15 Morgan, “Glasgow Showdown: Pacific Islands Demand Global Leaders Bring Action, Not Excuses, to UN Summit” In Down To Earth (blog) (2021).
16 Farbotko, “Wishful Sinking: Disappearing Islands, Climate Refugees and Cosmopolitan Experimentation” In Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51 (1): 47–60 (2010).
17 Russell, “Canaries in the Climate Change Coal Mines?” In The Atlantic, 2009, sec. Technology (2009).
18 Handmer and Nalau, “Understanding Loss and Damage in Pacific Small Island Developing States,” 368
19 Donner, “Fantasy Island” In Scientific American 312 (3): 56–63 (2015).
20 Farbotko, “Wishful Sinking”.
21 Ibid. 47
22 Barnett, “The Dilemmas of Normalising Losses from Climate Change”, 4.
23 Trundle, Barth, and Mcevoy, “Leveraging Endogenous Climate Resilience: Urban Adaptation in Pacific Small Island Developing States” In Environment and Urbanization 31 (1): 53–74 (2019).
24 Idem.
25 Fisher, “Environmental Regulation and Risk-Benefit Analysis: From Technical to Deliberative Policy Making” inIn Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State, Second Edition, 59–80. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
26 Ibid. 73
27 Bravo, “The Postcolonial Arctic” In Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 15: 93–111. (2005).
28 Rantanen and et al., “The Arctic Has Warmed Nearly Four Times Faster than the Globe since 1979” In Communcations Earth & Environment (2022).
29 Landauer and Juhola, “Loss and Damage in the Rapidly Changing Arctic” In Loss and Damage from Climate Change: Concepts, Methods and Policy Options, 425–47 (Springer open, 2019).
30 Ibid. 436
31 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
32 Arctic Circle, “About the Arctic Circle”
33 Pressman, Northern Cityscape: Linking Design to Climate (Yellowknife: Winter Cities Association, 1995).
34 Egelius, “Ralph Erskine: The Humane Architect” In Architectural Design 47 (11–12): 750–852 (1977).
35 McGowan, “Ralph Erskine, (Skiing) Architect,” In Nordlit 23: 241–50 (2008), 250.
36 Sheppard and White, Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2017).
37 Hemmersam, Making the Arctic City (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 190.
38 Bravo, “The Postcolonial Arctic.”