Addressing the risk of maladaptation to climate change

This paper reviews the current theoretical scholarship on maladaptation and provides
some speci!c case studies—in the Maldives, Ethiopia, South Africa, and
Bangladesh—to advance the !eld by offering an improved conceptual understanding
and more practice-oriented insights. It notably highlights four main
dimensions to assess the risk of maladaptation, that is, process, multiple drivers,
temporal scales, and spatial scales. It also describes three examples of frameworks—
the Pathways, the Precautionary, and the Assessment frameworks—that can
help capture the risk of maladaptation on the ground. Both these conceptual and
practical developments support the need for putting the risk of maladaptation at
the top of the planning agenda. The paper argues that starting with the intention
to avoid mistakes and not lock-in detrimental effects of adaptation-labeled initiatives
is a !rst, key step to the wider process of adapting to climate variability and
change. It thus advocates for the anticipation of the risk of maladaptation to
become a priority for decision makers and stakeholders at large, from the international
to the local levels. Such an ex ante approach, however, supposes to get a
clearer understanding of what maladaptation is. Ultimately, the paper af!rms that
a challenge for future research consists in developing context-speci!c guidelines
that will allow funding bodies to make the best decisions to support adaptation
(i.e., by better capturing the risk of maladaptation) and practitioners to design
adaptation initiatives with a low risk of maladaptation.