Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods (Vol. 1)

Climate change adaptation is a response to global warming that seeks to reduce the vulnerability of social and biological systems to relative sudden change and thus offset the effects of global warming. Even if emissions are stabilised relatively soon, global warming and its effects should lost many years, and adaptation would be necessary in the resulting changes in climate. Adaptation is especially important in developing countries, since those countries are predicted to bear the brunt of the effects of global warming. That is the capacity and potential for humans to adapt is unevenly distributed across different regions and populations and developing countries generally have less capacity to adapt. Furthermore the degree of adaptation correlates to the situational focus on environmental issues. Therefore adaptation requires the situational assessment of sensitivity and vulnerability to environmental impacts. Adaptive capacity is closely linked to social and economic development.