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This chapter summarizes the tool box of options for confronting the consequences of climate change through building local-scale adaptive capacity in societies and improving the condition of the natural resources on which people depend for their livelihoods. Building adaptive capacity will require strengthening appropriate aspects of a society’s flexibility, assets, learning and social organizations. The ways of doing this are diverse and will, of course, depend on existing local capacities and needs. Improving the condition of resources tends to require restricting or limiting society’s actions. For coral reef fisheries, options include restricting specific fishing grounds, the time that people can fish, the gear they can use, and the species they can capture. These two broad concepts, of building social capacities and limiting certain types of resource use, interact in complicated ways. Consequently, there is often a need for coupled actions that simultaneously govern resource use and build capacity in society.

In many places building adaptive capacity will be a critical part of preparing for climate change. This chapter discusses ways to build adaptive capacity in society, which is defined as attempts to improve people’s broad ability to cope with and adapt to change, and to take advantages of the opportunities provided by change. This chapter explores various strategies for building adaptive capacity, by reviewing key findings from the various academic disciplines that have long histories of application and research in building adaptive capacity, including human geography, development studies, agricultural economics, and understanding social-ecological systems. The chapter is focused primarily on the individual, community, and local institution scales, and provides examples related to natural resource use and management where possible. Specific strategies include avoiding or escaping poverty traps, creating robust and flexible institutions, improving governance through increased transparency, and fostering the ability of individuals and institutions to learn about climate change. Many of the policies and programs to build adaptive capacity will require external donor pressure and aid, as well as government support.

Across the western Indian Ocean, coastal communities vary dramatically in social, ecological, and environmental conditions, with profound implications for resource management and climate change adaptation policies. This chapter develops a framework for understanding key local contextual conditions related to how vulnerable coastal societies are to climate change based on an integrated assessment of environmental exposure, ecosystem conditions, and social adaptive capacity. Critically, this information can be used to prioritize pragmatic, local-scale conservation and adaptation actions. The current emphasis on the creation of large fisheries closures to build ecological resilience and minimize climate change impacts is most likely to be successful in regions where high adaptive capacity and low exposure intersect. Other regions will require more focus on moderate resource-use restrictions and enhancing adaptive capacity.

Humans are integral parts of marine social—ecological systems. Changes in marine ecosystems impact human communities, and changes in human communities impact marine ecosystems. The interactive nature of these systems is the key to their understanding and governance. This chapter focuses on communities with small‐scale fisheries interacting with their local and regional marine ecosystems. It asks what contributes to high or low resilience to global changes, and considers the intensity of changes, the exposure of the human community, and the ability of the community to cope and adapt. Two additional themes run through the chapter: value, including both monetary and non‐monetary (e.g. cultural) values; and scale, in particular scale mismatches between non‐human marine ecosystems, fishing communities, and their governance systems. Understanding what makes marine social—ecological systems resilient or vulnerable in a world of increasing uncertainty requires the collaborative efforts of natural and social scientists, resource users and managers, and the larger resource community.

This chapter examines key components of social vulnerability to changes in the flow of goods and services from marine systems. This chapter builds on existing national-scale studies of vulnerability to climate change by drilling down to explore both local and national scale indicators of vulnerability to key impacts of climate change. The chapter compares indicators of sensitivity and adaptive capacity across the region to reveal that the considerable spatial variability in how Indian Ocean societies will be affected by, and take advantage of opportunities provided by climate change. Importantly, national-scale measures of vulnerability may not necessarily reflect the local-scale situations in coastal societies. Also, there is considerable intra-country variation in key components of vulnerability. Strategies to reduce vulnerability will have to understand which components of adaptive capacity can be increased and which aspects of sensitivity can be reduced based on existing strengths and weaknesses in these areas.

This chapter examines stress models in the rat using the biology of the rat and its natural defense mechanisms as a starting point. It focuses on tests that explore the capacity of rats to cope with ecologically relevant problems. Stress models challenge the natural defense mechanisms and hence call on the adaptive capacity of the animal. However, rather than pushing the animal toward a stress physiological ceiling, it might be far more informative to explore the natural factors that determine and modulate the individual adaptive capacity. These factors include not only perinatal and adult (social) experience but also factors that affect the speed of recovery after a stressor.

The theoretical framework of the book is developed here where the three axes are proposed for contextualizing the solutions to climate change. The axes include an ecological conditions, an axis of exposure to climate change, and an axis of adaptive capacity, each determined by local conditions. Appropriate adaptation efforts will depend on the interaction of these three axes and a site’s position along these axes can provide important information about the types of policies and actions required.

The current status of the global marine fisheries is evaluated using the conflict, food security, and vulnerability framework. Factors that influence the fisheries exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity are presented along with ways to build the adaptive capacity. Flexibility, assets, social organization, and learning are evaluated for their potential to reduce the many possible environmental and social threats to marine resource sustainability.

Chapter 10 applies the two methods of comparative case study and cumulative case study to address the three main research questions raised in the introduction. Present adaptations are seen in relation to projected future climate changes and in relation to uncertain production conditions in general. Drivers of change and adaptive capacity are identified, and, lastly, a list of policy options that can enhance adaptive capacity are related to levels of policy management.

Conservation in the Anthropocene requires collaborative efforts to understand the complexities of environmental change and its impacts on ecological integrity and ecosystem services. Palaeoecology and other environmental archives have vast potential to further our understanding of the resilience and adaptive capacity of ecological systems, and the ‘safe operating space for humanity’. This book explores how long-term data can contribute to resolving the pressing environmental problems of today, such as climate change, re-wilding, fire management, and sustainable ecosystem services, while maintaining options and resilience for the future. Exploring this potential further will require a willingness of conservation scientists, palaeoecologists, policy makers and many other stakeholders to engage in a multidisciplinary process of collaborative learning, with the aim of developing shared visions for resilient, multifunctional landscapes. Our ability to sustain ecosystem services and adaptive capacity depends on developing a past–present–future perspective that is inclusive, flexible and adaptive, and optimistic.

This chapter examines the capacity of policy institutions to respond to the WMD threat. It considers five elements of adaptive capacity in the institutional system, and asks whether these are currently effective and cost-efficient or are moving on a reasonable trajectory in these directions. They are (i) mobilizing sufficient resources; (ii) expending resources wisely; (iii) involving the private sector; (iv) creating and improving institutional capacity; and (v) governmental learning. The mainstream consensus among experts is that the mobilization of resources falls short, though probably not disastrously so. Such resources as we deploy are targeted about as well as government does such targeting generally. But spending and targeting money appears to be easier than building the needed institutional capacity — that is, fixing our public bureaucracies and getting them to work together — and in this regard homeland security resembles government generally.

The number and scale of natural disasters have increased in the past decades and may continue to rise in the future. Thus, it is crucial to quantitatively understand how to reduce vulnerability, enhance resilience, and increase adaptive capacity of coupled human and natural systems to natural disasters. This chapter demonstrates the utility of two quantitative indicators—index system of human dependence on ecosystem services (IDES) and human well-being index (HWBI)—in disaster research in the model coupled system of Wolong Nature Reserve. Models integrating the two indices helped to characterize the response of coupled systems to disasters. Results show that the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake caused a decline of 48% and 12.6% in dependence on ES and human well-being, respectively. Disadvantaged people who lacked access to different forms of capital suffered most from disasters both in terms of direct impacts and the post-disaster recovery. An earthquake recovery and restoration plan helped to improve the overall adaptive capacity at the reserve level but did not restore and even deteriorated adaptive capacity at the household level. These findings suggest that the design of disaster recovery and restoration plans should target capacity building at multiple levels, adapt to local contexts, and account for uncertainties. The methods and findings from this study may provide insights for such future research in Wolong and many other areas around the globe.

The chapter outlines the theoretical approach applied in the empirical chapters (Chapters 4–9). It defines ‘adaptive capacity’ as a function of flexibility, resilience, and innovation. Special emphasis is given to flexibility. ‘Flexibility of alternation’ is defined as the ability to alternate between known crops and technologies, while ‘flexibility of retention’ refers to the practice of not utilizing production factors maximally in normal years.

Institutions of cadre training in Zouping have adjusted to the broad transformations that have swept across the party and Chinese society. Changes in cadre training at the local level demonstrate the responsiveness of traditional Leninist organizations, such as grassroots party schools, to a rapidly changing environment. Cadre training has fragmented, and there now exist myriad providers of services that compete and complement the work of party schools. Party schools have responded to competition by diversifying their portfolio of activities. This indicates that there is adaptive capacity within local party organizations, but these organizations must strike a careful balance between the political imperatives of the party and the economic pressures of the market.

This chapter examines how humans reengineer the world to suit their own needs, a process known as domesticating nature. The New Ecology is grappling with the issue of what an increasingly domesticated world means for the inner workings of nature. Ecological scientific study is already revealing important impacts on ecosystems that could jeopardize sustainability. But in doing so, it is also newly uncovering interesting ways that species may respond to changes wrought by humans. The chapter considers the new theories being advanced by ecologists to explain how nature works in order to address the challenges presented by human domestication of nature. For example, ecologists are now deploying transplant experiments that test for local adaptation and plasticity in thermal tolerance among species populations and whether this adaptive capacity is sufficient to sustain biodiversity, food web dependencies, and ecosystem functions along with services across different thermal conditions.

The epilogue traces three ways in which education affects the future, and how we view and analyze it. First, education affects our cognition and hence how we perceive the environment and react to it through differential behaviour. Second, in the demographic context the explicit incorporation of education heterogeneity into projection models produces different future trends. For example, an exclusively age-specific perspective projects significant increases in disability due to population ageing. But accounting for education heterogeneity indicates a decline in future disability due to better educated elderly who have lower disability. As another example, socially desirable fertility can lie below replacement level once education is factored in. The third way deals with multiple individual and social benefits of education ranging from economic growth to enhanced adaptive capacity to disasters. The epilogue summarizes research based on the new Institute for Applied Systems Analysis data structured by age, sex, and level of education.

This chapter outlines the mental maps of char dwellers, and shows the coping and adjustment strategies that they adopt to live in an environment of vulnerability and isolation. People live in a risky and uncertain environment not only because they have incomplete knowledge or because their rationality is bounded by compelling factors, but also because they take a calculated risk. They opt for a chance like that in a lottery or a gamble, a risk which is informed by the intimate knowledge developed over many years of living in a fluid and dynamic environment. Ill health, especially of income-earning members of the community, brings vulnerability to char dwellers because of their extreme poverty, affecting both the expenditures and income of households. Thus, char dwellers have honed their adaptive capacity as an important strategy for coping with the fragile environment in which they live.