Climate risks and adaptive capacity in aboriginal communities, final report

In the summer of 2008, CIER and researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) partnered to add depth to those initial findings, expand the scope to include Inuit and Métis communities south of 60º (Figure 1) and focus more explicitly on issues of capacity and vulnerability. [...] The objectives of year one were to define and initiate several project elements, some of which will be ongoing, and to develop the conceptual framework and approach to guide the implementation of the project goals set out above. [...] Institutions are increasingly recognized as having a central role to play in adaptive actions and as such are often central to the building of adaptive capacity and resilience, the reduction of vulnerability, and the implementation of adaptation. [...] Operationalizing these core concepts and implementing the broader objectives of the project are the focus of section 4. This includes discussion of how an informal research network has been initiated, the process for identification of two types of case studies, and the development of a basic participatory research framework to guide community-based research. [...] In the end, it is the dynamic relationship between the conditions to which a community is exposed, how sensitive the community is to the harm posed by such conditions (increasingly referred to by the compound term exposure-sensitivity) and the capacity of the community to effectively adapt that determines local vulnerability (Smit and Wandel 2006).