Efforts need to centrally examine and address the causes of vulnerability in MLICs, enhance resilience and adaptation efforts in ways that harmonize with development needs and practices, and attend to multiple scales and multiple (and potentially also multiscalar) sources of stress. Varied, multiple-scale causes of vulnerability must be identified, and adaptation must be addressed in a similarly broad fashion while pressing beyond the current IAV literature’s tendencies toward abstraction and generalities. To do so, research now must produce more detailed and context-sensitive knowledge of a wide complex of socio-environmental factors and dynamics, including the interplay of the divergent values of various socio-economic groups and societies, interests, meaning-making and inequities in power and resource distributions. This will drive research and policy into difficult, exciting, and even entirely new, areas of research. On the basis of the current scientific literature, we suggest that research must focus on how to best inform and design effective and democratic Earth system governance institutions capable of responding to the global environmental challenges of the 21st century. This research must include the institutional restructuring needed to alter current environmental trends and ensure improved decision-making in line with the MDGs and United
Nations-defined human rights-related and equity-related imperatives. These suggestions resonate with an important strand of the current IAV literature, yet continue to be insufficiently heeded in practice, highlighting the need to also research causes of inertia in IAV-related research and policy.
Scientific knowledge is fundamental for interventions aimed at reconciling environmental sustainability and climate-change challenges with development goals. However, IAV and development research needs to grow more interdisciplinary, specific and action-oriented if it is to help create the knowledge and conditions needed for successful, democratic, economic, and sociopolitical reform for all parts of the world’s population. Producing such knowledge requires greater inclusion of MLIC researchers, a rethinking of research structures, institutions, and paradigms that thus far have dominated global change research, as well as critical analysis of current decision-making processes and associated information structures and power-structures.
Synthesis studies involving in-depth, long-term, and empirically-based research should be produced to identify causal factors through the analysis of dynamics at multiple dimensions and scales. Such analyses should be sufficiently complete to highlight the concrete links between vulnerability and development, and the dynamics and decision-making structures that maintain inequality. They should draw from, and integrate, currently fragmented fields of knowledge spanning many disciplines. Reducing vulnerability and adapting to climate change in MLICs requires a dynamic and multidimensional process in which scholars strengthen and participate in efforts aimed at local development through the involvement of public, private, and social sectors.
1. Romero Lankao P, Nychka D, Tribbia JL: Development and
greenhouse gas emissions deviate from the ‘modernization’ theory and ‘convergence’ hypothesis. Climate Res 2008, 38:17-29.
This study shows that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries will be far harder than many policymakers have predicted. This is due mainly to economic and technological disparities between rich and poor nations. The barrier will be a major barrier to the adoption of efficient and renewable forms of energy.