Adaptation: Reducing Vulnerability or Redistributing it?

The authors find that practitioners and policy-makers give only superficial attention to the risk of adaptation activities redistributing vulnerability, and that conceptual research on maladaptation has not yet translated into sufficient empirical evidence regarding the distributional impacts of real-world adaptation.

• Practitioners, policy-makers, project planners, and international funds generally ignore or give only superficial attention to the possibility that adaptation responses may redistribute risk or vulnerability, with concerns about maladaptation remaining marginal to decision-making and evaluation processes.
• There is a significant gap in the current knowledge base because conceptual work on maladaptation has not produced a substantial body of empirical literature on how real-world adaptation activities impact the distribution of vulnerability, which may lead to risks being shifted toward already marginalized communities.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2017). Adaptation: Reducing Vulnerability or Redistributing it? https://www.sei.org/publications/adaptation-reducing-vulnerability-or-redistributing/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Adaptation: Reducing Vulnerability or Redistributing it? 2017. https://www.sei.org/publications/adaptation-reducing-vulnerability-or-redistributing/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Adaptation: Reducing Vulnerability or Redistributing it? |date=30 October 2017 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/adaptation-reducing-vulnerability-or-redistributing/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2017adaptation, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Adaptation: Reducing Vulnerability or Redistributing it?}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2017}, month = oct, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/adaptation-reducing-vulnerability-or-redistributing/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }