IDOS at the Accountable Adaptation Symposium in London

The discussions focussed on questions and challenges of defining and measuring adaptation success tying in with the call from politics to action. IDOS Klimalog researchers Nikolas Wagner and Dennis Schüpf participated in the Symposium, held on 9 and 10 September, and hosted by UCL Risk & Disaster Reduction (RDR).

Over the two days, practitioners, policy-makers and researchers came together to reflect critically on some of the most pressing questions concerning climate change adaptation. Through in-depth discussions and small workshop groups, participants reflected on the underlying politics of adaptation processes at local, national and international scales. What counts as success in adaptation and who gets to decide and measure it is hereby crucial to enable transformative adaptation that does not bypass structural issues of power, race and gender. A key takeaway was that if we want adaptation interventions to be effective in the long term, we need to make explicit the political dynamics that shape approaches at local, national, and international levels. Also, the definition of adaptation success is rather in within a continuum than to be defined at a specific point were things meet an end.