The Governance of Adaptation

The paper examines how climate change vulnerability is distributed across social groups in the UK, highlighting that those who emit the least are often the most vulnerable and most likely to be negatively impacted by both mitigation and adaptation policies. It critiques 'top-down' impacts-based assessments for ignoring social complexity and proposes a shift toward 'bottom-up' vulnerability assessments and governance based on fairness to protect marginalized populations.

• The author identifies a 'quadruple injustice' of climate change in the UK, where certain disadvantaged groups—including those on low incomes, the socially marginalised, and older people—emit the least, may be negatively impacted by mitigation policies, are most vulnerable to climate impacts, and may be negatively impacted by adaptation policies.
• Top-down, impacts-based adaptation assessments typically focus on physical and natural systems, which often fails to represent the social nature of climate impacts and vulnerability because social systems are too complex to be modelled in the same way as hydrology or coastal change.
• There is a strong correlation between household income and emissions in Great Britain, with higher-income households generally emitting more and lower-income groups emitting the least.
• Social vulnerability to climate impacts in England is highly concentrated in deprived urban and coastal areas; specifically, 8% of neighbourhoods have extremely high flood-related social vulnerability and 9% have extremely high heat vulnerability, with 64% of those extremely vulnerable to flooding also being extremely vulnerable to heat.
• Autonomous adaptation driven by market forces can lead to 'mal-adaptation' that increases vulnerability for the poor. Examples include Rising Block Tariffs for water, which may penalise low-income households unable to afford water-efficient technology, and risk-based flood insurance, which could leave high-risk areas 'blighted' and uninsurable.
• The UK's Heatwave Plan for England and Wales is criticized for relying on oversimplified, health-based definitions of vulnerability that ignore the social processes determining who can cope with heat, and for failing to involve vulnerable groups or community stakeholders in its implementation.
• The author suggests that adaptation governance could be improved by appealing to public attitudes toward fairness to support policies that transfer resources from high emitters to the most vulnerable, such as using taxes on high-emitting behaviour to build resilience among marginalized groups.

APA

Benzie, M. (2012). The Governance of Adaptation. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/Adaptation/SEI-Benzie-Social-Justice-and-Adaptation-in-the-UK.pdf

Chicago

Benzie, Magnus. The Governance of Adaptation. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2012. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/Adaptation/SEI-Benzie-Social-Justice-and-Adaptation-in-the-UK.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Benzie |first1=Magnus |title=The Governance of Adaptation |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=2012 |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/Adaptation/SEI-Benzie-Social-Justice-and-Adaptation-in-the-UK.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{benzie2012governance, author = {Benzie, Magnus}, title = {{The Governance of Adaptation}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2012}, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/Adaptation/SEI-Benzie-Social-Justice-and-Adaptation-in-the-UK.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }