Adaptation—Genuine and Spurious

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Adaptation—Genuine and Spurious: Demystifying Adaptation Processes in Relation to Climate Change”—comes from Volume 1 (2010). In their article, Thomas F. Thornton and Nadia Manasfi critically examine the concept of human adaptation by dividing it into eight fundamental processes and viewing each in a broad cultural, ecological, and evolutionary context. They focus their assessment especially on northern indigenous peoples, who exist at the edges of present-day climate governance frameworks but at the center of increasingly acute climate stress.

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The massive Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is rapidly retreating. In this photo a developing forest can be seen above the glacier illustrating how the Mendenhall landscape is being dramatically altered by climate change (photograph by Durelle Scott, courtesy of the National Science Foundation, CC BY 2.0).

THOMAS F. THORNTON is Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, where he also directs the Environmental Change and Management MSc course. An anthropologist, he has written widely on human ecology, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, conservation, coastal and marine environments, conceptualizations of space and place, and the political ecology of resource management among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and the circumpolar North. His most recent publications include “Coastal Lakes and Lagoons as Dynamic Sites of Exchange among the Tlingit of Alaska” (2017) and Being and Place among the Tlingit (2008).

NADIA MANASFI completed her masters degree in Environmental Change and Management at the University of Oxford in 2009. A paper based on the results of her dissertation, “Finding the Balance: Challenges and Opportunities for Climate Change Adaptation in Different Levels of English Local Government,” co-authored with Elizabeth Greenhalgh, was published in 2011. Following graduation, she conducted research on adaptation in indigenous communities as part of an internship at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Her more recent work with the German International Cooperation (GIZ, formerly GTZ) has focused on climate change adaptation in developing countries, and she plays an active role in advising partner countries on climate-robust development planning.