At present, the hardships caused due to the climate crises on a global scale are undeniable for the current and future periods. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group (WG) II's 6th Assessment Report has acknowledged that levelling the global temperature by 1.5°C would result in unescapable growth of climatic calamities and pose detrimental risks to the population and its associated ecosystems.
A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) titled “The State of Climate in 2021” declared that extreme weather events are the “New Normal.” Hence climate change adaptations, either planned or autonomous, must be in continuous practice and improvement.
IPCC WGII 6th Assessment Report has admitted a myriad of benefits of implementing adaptive measures across multiple sectors, like nurturing agriculture, food & livelihood security, disaster resiliency, technology innovation, and so on.
The burning question is which scale is needed to implement adaptation measures to substantially reduce climate risk and vulnerability. Actually, the number of poorly designed adaptation practices could exacerbate climate-induced vulnerabilities rather than mitigate them, resulting in maladaptation.
Maladaptation is when a group of people becomes more vulnerable to climate change impact than their previous state after applying a certain adaptive measure. The adaptation strategies would be fragile when dominating factors (inequalities, reliance on infrastructural and institutional frameworks, synchronization with development schemes, etc.) are sidestepped. As a consequence, these could cause “rebound vulnerability,” which means vulnerabilities could relapse back from low to high severity for existing situations or generate a new driver. That's why IPCC WGII 6th Assessment Report has referred to maladaptation as an unintended consequence.
Once the adaptation goes wrong, it has to be settled for the well-being of the society and community who are the front-liners of experiencing rebound vulnerability from climate change. The eight principles of Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) endorsed by the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) have the potential to negotiate with maladaptation.
The core theme of LLA is that adaptation measures have to be people-centric with an aim to exclude historical elimination and injustice. Therefore, local communities and institutions have to be involved to evaluate the shortcomings of the already existing maladaptation. Further steps to bounce back from maladaptation by LLA have to be planned with improved funding from the higher level of authority. Correspondingly, The LLA approach should be a combination of indigenous knowledge from lower appropriate levels and a mixture of scientific understandings of the experts.
The reflection on how LLA can contribute to recovering mismanagements imposed by maladaptation to get a climate-resilient society is crucial. A case study from polderization in Bangladesh demonstrates that the construction of 139 polders (earthen embankments) during the 1960s in the southern coastal belt is considered to be a successful adaptive measure.
This measure became fruitful for flood protection and food security inside the polder which was visible immediately within 10-15 years. Nevertheless, the polder project was planned without taking into account the dynamic hydro-ecological context of the locations. Hence the polders interrupted the interconnectedness between the floodplain-river.
In this way, the floodplains were deprived of getting a high volume of silts which are accompanied by the river tides. Consequently, sediments were starting to be deposited alongside the riverbed by increasing the height of the riverbed simultaneously. Raising the water level higher in the river than the level of the land within the polder, accelerates the degradation of land.
The horrific consequence is prolonged waterlogging. Shifting the polder boundary towards the east and land subsidence inside the polder are secondary cascading disasters to occur after waterlogging. Such a scenario raises questions in the local community about how to maintain a balance between the inside and outside of the polder. The equilibrium in water movement is an inevitable solution for the sustainability of the polder.
‘Tidal River Management (TRM)' is such a solution.TRM is not an innovation of the 21st Century, rather it is an indigenous technique to control rivers through sediment and tidal flow management by implementing ancestral ecological knowledge of floodplain areas of the Bengal delta. In Bangladesh, it was first adopted by local communities and NGOs along Beel Bhayna and Beel Dakatiya (located in the Khulna-Jessore region) by raising land of about 31 km in the 1990s.
The local community practice of “overflow” irrigation and effective management of sediment is newly termed TRM by experts. The concept is simple i.e., the local community cut the embankment at an appropriate point to let the river flow in and allow the sediment to settle into the floodplain. The height of the land gets raised by sediment deposition with the passage of time. Also, the soil gets nutrients from those depositions. The sediment does not deposit on the riverbed so river navigability remains uninterrupted. Hence, TRM is an LLA approach for minimising the maladaptation practice of traditional polderization of the coastal community in Bangladesh.
The certain case of applying TRM for averting water logging issues in polderized areas has conceptualized how LLA could be an effective pathway to curtail maladaptive outcomes. It is well articulated that maladaptation is influenced by multiple drivers (for instance, location, group of people).
Therefore, assessment of the vulnerability drivers, harmonisation of adaptation strategies with development trajectories, the inclusion of vulnerable communities in the development agenda, and cost-benefit analysis by the decision-makers in accordance with resource availability are some of the measures to reduce lock-ins and generate opportunities. Hence, the ground-breaking eight principles of LLA would assist the practitioners and decision-makers to have a way out from the detrimental impacts of maladaptation and initiate a journey toward practising successful adaptation measures.
Shamrita Zaman is currently working at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) as a Senior Researcher. She is enthusiastic about working on various domains of climate change including climate change adaptation & environmental migration, disaster & conflict, risk-based coastal infrastructure design. She can be reached at shamrita.zaman@icccad.org
Maliha Masfiqua Malek is currently working at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) as a Research Officer. She is enthusiastic about working on coastal areas of Bangladesh in the context of climate change. She can be reached at maliha.malek@icccad.org