Chair: Tommy Moore
Dr. Alexandre K. Magnan (1)
1 Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), Paris, 75007, France
Background
Ocean warming and acidification (OA&W) pose serious threats to marine and coastal organisms and ecosystems, and to their services to humans. Impacts are already detectable from high to low latitudes, and are expected to increase drastically even in the RCP 2.6 scenario that is in line with the +2°C (air temp.) 2100 target. Impacts of OA&W are thus now partly unavoidable, which means that besides international emissions mitigation efforts, adaptation must be promoted from national to local scales in both developing and developed countries. Accordingly, a key challenge consists in better understanding vulnerability to OA&W (forms, drivers, timescales, etc.) in order to identify relevant and context-specific adaptation pathways.
Methods
This communication builds on the author’s 10-year research experience in vulnerability and adaptation to climate change to propose a framework for addressing vulnerability to OA&W, an emerging scientific and policy issue.
Findings
Two major ideas are promoted. First, vulnerability to OA&W results from interactions between natural and anthropogenic drivers. A framework based on 7 generic drivers is proposed to address vulnerability in a comprehensive way. Second, assessing current and future vulnerability requires to address the root causes of vulnerability, which can be done by going back into the past decades to identify the drivers (and their combinations over time) that generated a territory’s or a sector’s vulnerability. This refers to the Trajectory of Vulnerability (TOV) approach that aims answering 3 interrelated questions: How have the vulnerability of a coastal territory or economic sector to OA&W changed over time? What factors and processes are driving these changes? And to what extent do TOVs provide insights to design robust adaptation pathways?
Conclusions
The TOV approach provides two major benefits to the understanding of adaptation, namely a dynamic conceptualisation of vulnerability, and the identification of pragmatic ways to avoid maladaptation to OA&W.