Dear Prof. Sovacool, I am at the same time a scholar of sustainable development and a practitioner of development cooperation. I read with much interest your article. I think however that the focus of your research question is misplaced. Your research findings have little to do with adaptation to climate change. Most of them are common throughout development cooperation. The fact that there is a lot of funding available for projects on adaptation to climate change compared to other environmental issues exacerbates well-known problems with development cooperation.
I am afraid that your article and its press release send a very wrong and dangerous message. Adaptation to climate change and in general resilience to exogenous shocks is very important in vulnerable countries like Bangladesh. The problem is not adaptation to climate change but development cooperation, which needs radical improvement. I would like to thank Professor Takei for sharing your work. Kind regards, J.M.Church -- Jon Marco CHURCH Associate Professor University of Reims IATEUR - BP 30 - 57 rue Pierre Taittinger - 51571 Reims Cedex - France Tel. : +33 (0)3 26 91 37 45 - www.univ-reims.fr New publication : < Soft power of Tajikistan on the water agenda >, in Water Resources in Central Asia, S.S. Zhiltsov et al. (ed.), Cham, Springer. -----Original Message----- From: Ecopolitics [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Milton Takei Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 2:57 AM To: Ecopolitics <[email protected]> Subject: [Ecopolitics] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong To ecopolitics subscribers: The following is from: [email protected] --Milton Takei Good morning from Europe everyone, As many of you know, much work in the community focuses on climate change mitigation, namely technologies, practices, and policies that can prevent emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. But equally important is adaptation, building resilience to the impacts of climate change. In that vein, drawing from two sets of interviews in Bangladesh, I was able to get the attached study into World Development by connecting it to concepts in political geography, political ecology, justice, and development studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17303285 Sovacool, BK. "Bamboo beating bandits: Conflict, inequality, and vulnerability in the political ecology of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh," World Development 102 (February, 2018), pp. 183-194. It's a bit dense and theoretical, but also troubling in its findings. To help try and spread some of its lessons, we've translated some of its findings into the blog below. Hopefully planners will start to design more equitable adaptation programs and policies going forward. Feedback most welcome on the conceptual framework as future work is applying it to disaster recovery, renewable energy, and low-carbon transitions. Benjamin http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/newsandevents/2017/findings/bangladesh [http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wcm/assets/media/25/banner/51585.jpg] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong in Bangladesh New research by Prof Benjamin Sovacool highlights the urgent need for climate change adaption policies in Bangladesh to be rethought. Bangladesh contributes little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, prone to a multitude of climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and storm surges, which are being worsened due to global warming. In addition to this, Bangladesh also has an extremely high population density with one of the worst rates of poverty in the world. Since May 2010, international donors have spent more than US$170m on climate change adaption efforts such as altering infrastructure, institutions and ecosystems in Bangladesh, bringing some success environmentally. Yet, research by Prof Sovacool <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/373957> examines and highlights how on the flip side of these efforts, existing social and political injustices within Bangladesh have been re-affirmed and exacerbated. In his paper 'Bamboo Beating Bandits: Conflict, Inequality, and Vulnerability in the Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh'<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X173032 85> Prof Sovacool reveals that climate change policies implemented under the country's National Adaptation Program of Action have ended up enabling elites to capture land through public servants, the military, and even gangs carrying bamboo sticks. Climate protection measures have also encroached upon village property, char (public) land, forests, farms, and other public commons. More shockingly, community coping strategies for climate change have actually entrenched class and ethnic hierarchies in some communities, trapping the poor, powerless and displaced in a patronage system, leading to increased human insecurity and intensified violent conflict. Using a mix of original interviews and a literature review, Prof Sovacool examined the processes of: * Enclosure - when adaptation projects transfer public assets into private hands or expand the roles of private actors into the public sphere * Exclusion - when adaptation projects limit access to resources or marginalize particular stakeholders in decision-making activities * Encroachment - when adaptation projects intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation * Entrenchment - when adaptation projects aggravate the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsen concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community _______________________________________________ Ecopolitics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opn.org/mailman/listinfo/ecopolitics_lists.opn.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
