Definitions
Adaptation
Changing existing policies and practices and
adopting new policies and practices so as to
secure Millennium Development Goals in the
face of climate change and its associated
impacts (UNDP unpublished, 2006).
Adaptive capacity
The property of a system to adjust its
characteristics or behavior in order to expand
its coping range under existing climate
variability or future change conditions.
The expression of adaptive capacity as actions
that lead to adaptation can serve to enhance
a system's coping capacity and increase its
coping range. Adaptive capacity represents
the set of resources available for adaptation
as well as the ability of the system to use
these resources effectively in the pursuit of
adaptation (APF 2005).
Mainstreaming
Incorporating climate change risks and
adaptation into:
- National policies, programmes and
priorities - ensuring that information
about climate-related risk, vulnerability, and
options for adaptation are incorporated into
planning and decision-making in key sectors,
such as agriculture, water, health, disaster
risk management and coastal development, as
well as into existing national assessments
and action plans, including Poverty Reduction
Strategies and Priorities.
- Development agency programmes and
policies - ensuring that plans and
priorities identified in development cooperation
frameworks incorporate climate change impacts
and vulnerability information to support
development outcomes (e.g., UNDP Country
Cooperation Framework, UN Common Country
Assessment and UNDAF).
Ideally, integration should become a systematic
process rather than a one-off process of utilizing
climate information in decisions. (UNDP draft Working Definition).
Risk
The result of the interaction of physically defined
hazards with the properties of the exposed systems
- i.e. their sensitivity or social vulnerability.
Risk can also be considered as the combination of
an event, its likelihood, and its consequences -
i.e. risk equals the probability of climate hazard
multiplied by a given system's vulnerability (APF 2005).
Vulnerability
The degree to which a system unit is susceptible to
harm due to exposure to a perturbation or stress
and the ability (or lack thereof) of the exposure
unit to cope, recover, or fundamentally adapt(become
a new system or become extinct) (Kasperson et al.,
2000.) It can also be considered as the underlying
exposure to damaging shocks, perturbations or stresses,
rather than the probability or projected incidence of
those shocks themselves (APF 2005).
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here for a full list of Adaptation programming definitions.
