4.6.23 Cascadia CoPes Hub / RCN Monthly Seminar Series

The Administrator's Dilemma in Relocation as Adaptation  | Speaker: A.R. Siders

Abstract: Adaptation to climate change has the potential to advance equity and justice, but practitioners disagree on what just adaptation looks like. Justice theories offer little guidance, and practitioners often make contradictory decisions based on their personal views. This talk uses U.S. floodplain buyouts to illustrate the challenge and argues that more audacious, transformative adaptation may be key to escaping governance structures and systems that challenge and may prevent just adaptation.

Bio: Dr. A.R. Siders is director of the Gerard J Mangone Climate Change Science and Policy Hub at the University of Delaware, and faculty in the Biden School of Public Policy, Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, and the Disaster Research Center. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation decision-making: how communities and governments make decisions about where, when, and how to adapt to climate change. She has recently worked on a Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative, to review adaptation efforts around the world, and as a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report and the U.S. National Climate Assessment.