Distributional effects.  The effects of climate change will vary by location, sector, and demographic group.

Care needs to be taken to ensure that adaptation strategies are targeted to address the right problem. As a result,

adaptation strategies may need to vary from place to place.  For example, experience shows that heat stress

disproportionately harms the elderly, the young, the poor, and the infirm.  Thus, when developing adaptation

strategies, vulnerable populations should be targeted.  Another complicating factor relates to distributional

effects:  one person’s negative impact might be another person’s positive opportunity.  For example, while

decreases in snowfall might harm the skiing industry, such an outcome would help municipalities save money on

snow removal activities.

Multiple stressors.  Several beneficial uses are already under stress from factors that have nothing to do with

climate change, such as land use and population growth.  Climate change could exacerbate or ameliorate such

existing stressors, a point that needs to be taken into account when developing adaptation strategies.

Cost.  Many productive activities require funding. Unfortunately, funds are scarce, so resources used for

adaptation must be diverted from other productive activities.  Until adaptation is recognized as vitally important,

other projects will be funded first.  For example, in the face of a dramatic problem like AIDS, it is difficult to get

the health care community to focus on the more insidious and less visible impacts of climate change.

The effectiveness of alternative adaptation strategies.  Adaptation responses vary in effectiveness from place

to place or across demographic groups.  Also, other stressors may impact the effectiveness of a particular

adaptation strategy.  Thus, care must be taken to perform a rigorous site-specific assessment of the efficacy of

different strategies.  In some cases, planners will find that an adaptation strategy needs to be augmented to

address community-specific challenges.  For example, when trying to identify the most appropriate strategy for

preventing heat-stress-related deaths, community leaders might have to go beyond issuing heat advisories and set

up a buddy system to ensure that the elderly are able to get out of their homes and into air-conditioned facilities.

Maladaptation.  Planners must realize that, if poorly designed adaptation measures result in detrimental

secondary effects, then society might be better off if such measures were not implemented.  For example, the use

of hatcheries to enhance natural recruitment of fish stocks could alter or impoverish biodiversity and harm the

genetic pool.  Another example:  Many think pest populations will increase as the climate changes.  Farmers

could adapt by applying more pesticides, but this will adversely impact water quality.

Multiple benefits.  Some “win-win” measures are sensible to undertake whether or not climate change occurs to

the full extent anticipated.  These can be described as the “low hanging fruit,” for example:  (1) improving

watershed management to reduce flood and drought damage and to protect water quality;  (2) removing incen-

tives for practices that place people, investments, and ecosystems in harm’s way;  (3) improving water pricing to

increase efficient water use;  (4) fostering continued adaptation in agriculture;  and (5) establishing surveillance

systems for vector-borne disease.

While easy to talk about in theory, adaptation is difficult and complex to implement in practice.  Efforts need to

be made to build a bridge between theory and practice.

Improving Integration of Adaptation into Decisions and Policy

Development and implementation of successful adaptation strategies is imperative now.  Scheraga identified five

concrete activities that the Water Quality Board could undertake.

Elicit information needs from decision-makers.  In order to develop successful adaptation strategies, the

Board needs to know who the stakeholders are and what endpoints they hope to achieve.  Workshops and

discussion forums are a means to:  (1) identify relevant stakeholders;  (2) learn more about their needs and issues

of concern;  and (3) find out how they perceive climate change risks.  Some such work has already been done,

for example, the Great Lakes Regional Assessment Team has held five workshops with different stakeholder

groups, during which participants discussed the potential impact of climate change on water levels, lake ecology,

agriculture, terrestrial ecology, and recreation.  The goal was to determine the type of information the stakehold-

ers need in order to make informed decisions.

Better characterize uncertainty for decision-makers and explain the implications of different outcomes.

Be clear about the uncertainties associated with climate change modeling and invest more effort to quantify

uncertainties and help decision-makers understand the implications of uncertainty.

11