As I told you, this is the story of a 29 years old PhD student, who thinks he can do a very effective and impressive research in next 23 months.
I was reading a book today titled “Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values and Governance” which I am going to write about it here and also add some of my personal comments/ideas along.

The first interesting point in this paper is that the authors mention that we cannot think about climate change in the way we think about weather. I/they mean when we encounter with an unprecedented weather, like a sudden rain in a sunny day, which happens often in Melbourne, having or buying an umbrella can solve the problems easily. Thinking about the possible cost of such an event, it is going to be as much as buying an umbrella which may be sold a few dollars more expensive than its usual price in a rainy day! But is it the same when we talk about climate change? The authors believe that the difference lays both in the time frame and in the significance of the changes required to adapt to this new situation. So, if in area X, if it has been raining 10 days in summer for last 50 years and this year suddenly they have 20 rainy days, this may cause big problems.

I liked a sentence in the book which says “the weather no longer is natural” and also when they say that politicians cannot blame weather anymore. They cannot say “It was out of our control”. I wish we could stop them saying that about other issues too.

One of the good ideas which I found reading this book was on the trade-off between adaptation and mitigation. This is interesting that as people look at the matter from economic point of view – where resources are limited and so you manage their allocation carefully – they come up with a choice/decision to make: How much to adaption? How much to mitigation?, where more adaption means less mitigation and vice versa. I think it is not just about economy, is it? I mean there are many other things which are going to be affected by climate change. According to the book, Schneider (2000) has introduced five numeraries for judging the significance of climate change impacts where monetary loss in only one of them.

The book, based on my understanding, introduces three main layers which are involved in adaptation process: individuals, collective action, governance; where last two ones are almost the same.

The book also talks about thresholds which seem to be very important. Based on what I read, I could prepare a primary idea for my first model which is going to consider a simple climate input, a community with some pre-defined thresholds and finally some observation aspects. I will write about this model more tomorrow. Enshallah!