I just want to transition a little bit because I ended there in economic evaluation and saying we're going in this direction, and really what we have not talked about in detail is this idea of uncertainty. So with economic evaluations, there is some uncertainty in there. But there's also a lot of uncertainty just in general around adaptation. Often with this field it seems that uncertainty gets a lot more face time than it does in other fields. So you might hear about uncertainty related to your climate models, you didn't account for this, you didn't account for that. These metrics were off by however much. So this model is not something that you can feel strongly certainty and that's going to happen. This is a science, it's dynamic. It's constantly changing. It's informing itself. We have some uncertainty and behavior change. So in adaptation, we're talking about how people and communities are going to be adapting to the stressors of climate change. It's very challenging to model that, so there's some uncertainty there. As we see in a lot of different examples that resources are not always certain. So you might have a large staff one day and then a smaller staff a couple of months from then and that might be because of finances. Maybe there's not as much grant dollars that are available for you to be able to do that work. But this idea of uncertainty, it seems to plague the climate and health, or climate change realm. I really like this figure that we have here that's titled robust adaptation to climate or from a paper that's titled robust adaptation to climate change. Really what it's showing here, at the base, is that our level or envelope of uncertainty is pretty large especially when we're thinking about adaptation responses. Then as you move up, you can go up through local impacts, and then your impact models, and then you're regional scenarios, and your climate model, your greenhouse gas, and future society. That uncertainty gets a little bit lower. The other way to think about it or to read it is to go from top down. So the future society we might have some idea of it, the greenhouse gas emissions we have more and so on and so forth. So we're thinking about how uncertainty and adaptation is really at the base of some of this. But it doesn't have to be prohibitive. So you and your current situation or your jurisdiction, you might encounter people who don't believe the climate science and they bring up this idea of uncertainty. That's not going to probably go away anytime soon, but it doesn't have to stop any progress that were being made. So if you start flipping what I have listed here and I talked about, the uncertainty in climate models are the uncertainty and behavior change and start thinking about it in a positive way. Maybe our uncertainty climate models is that we're getting better at it. So they're getting better at actually predicting and showing trends. Our uncertainty and behavior change is that we can anticipate or we might underestimate how much people change as we start to talk more and do more work on climate and health adaptation. It might be that our resources change because something happens contextually or in society that supports more investment both in human and financial capital in those resources. So I just want to make note of uncertainty because there are points at which when you're working in climate adaptation you might feel like it is an uphill battle. But it shouldn't stop us and it hasn't stopped other areas and other specialties. So it shouldn't be as prohibitive as maybe we allow it to be in some cases. So lastly, I want to talk a bit about maladaptations. So we've been talking about adaptations which the assumption is that there's something positive happening there that you might be strengthening or maintaining your resilience. The term maladaptation is becoming more and more common because adaptation is happening more, so we're getting more information that we can then evaluate and then improve on and some maladaptations are starting to show up and we have examples of those. But maladaptations are defined as activities that can be seen as more harmful than helpful, and they could be actions that result in an undesirable or unintended consequence. Like it might increase vulnerability when it was intended to decrease exposure. So it's a complicated concept to wrap your head around because it's influenced by multiple drivers and it can happen at various temporal and spatial scales. So it's not always easy to find, it's not always easy to lock down. So in practice, there's some question around what it means to have climate maladaptation. So let's say you did your adaptation action and it failed, is that a maladaptation? So the current science is grappling with that question as well as an adaptation action that resulted in an anticipated change. Is that a maladaptation? How do you actually know if it's a maladaptive action? So that gets at that planning point. If you go back to your plan, ideally you'll be thinking through a lot of the times steps that would accompany an adaptation action. So you might be able to pick up where something could become maladaptive, or harmful, or hurtful, but you might not. So those questions of space and time are also something to consider when we're thinking about maladaptation. As we do more work we're going to get more information about that. So it's evolving. I did come across a really, I thought, wonderful graphic that demonstrates this relationship between adaptation, failed adaptation, and maladaptation. So I just want to show it here. So on the top we have the impact on reducing climate risk and so you have either a positive, no effect or negative, and then on the left the impact on well-being so similarly, positive, no effect, and negative. So we use a lot of matrices that seems. So here they identify that adaptations, an adaptation would be something that is positive on reducing the climate risk and is also either positive or has no effect on well-being. A failed adaptation would be something that has no effect or a positive effect on wellness. So it's either neutral or it does something good but it has no effect on the climate risk. So the climate risk being what we're thinking about is like our climate exposure. Then the maladaptation is when you have any type of harmful or negative impact on wellness and then a negative impact on the climate risk. So this is one of the guiding principles for the idea of maladaptation, failed adaptation, and adaptation. So some examples that we have seen in our field of climate and health, they are fairly simple. So one example is, let's go back to our first example one of the priority areas of concern that we had where children engaged in outdoor recreation programs and we were concerned about them and getting heat stroke because it's getting hotter. So let's say that is a population that's living in the northeast of the United States, and the northeast of the United States there is also this increase in cases of Lyme disease. So if a policy to protect those case in the outdoor recreation program was to wear like loose fitting clothing, some type of sleeveless shirt or shorts, without mentioning the use of something like a bug spray you might actually be introducing a potential maladaptation for that specific population because they might now be more exposed potentially to ticks that carry Lyme disease. So that would be an example of maladaptation for climate and health. Another example which is one that has been debated in a few circles that I've been involved in which is great because I think we need to talk about this, but again with an example with heat is in some locations in some areas of cities, there are some proposals to increase the amount of air conditioning, and so the idea would be that handout more air conditioners, air conditioning units to vulnerable populations who are going to experience really high temperatures so that they can stay cool if it gets really hot. However, that in general over a longer timeframe, so this is where the temporal component comes in. The emissions from the use of those air conditioning units are actually contributing to higher greenhouse gas emissions so by this matrix they would call that a maladaptation because it has a negative impact on reducing the climate risks. So you can start to think about that just to have it within your rear view mirror or your side mirrors so that when you're starting to think about planning some of these activities you're really thinking about them in a holistic way. So there are some guidelines to limit this risk of maladaptation and I have a table here that comes from a book written by Barnett and O'Neill and it's pretty nice but the guidelines are fairly simple. So here they have on the left the characteristics of the maladaptation so getting back to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. The guideline would be, make sure it doesn't increase the greenhouse gas emissions. Another characteristics is that a disproportionately burdens the most vulnerable. So those folks who are going to be experiencing the real direct impacts of climate change the guideline would be ensure that the economically and socially equitable initiatives that you put in place consider that. High opportunity costs is another characteristic of maladaptation, so they say avoid those. Another characteristic is to reduce the incentive to adapt so you would want to increase the incentive to adapt. Then lastly the path dependency, you would really want to build some flexibility into your initiative so it doesn't become so difficult that it's maladaptive. So those are some of the general ideas around maladaptation and I came across this quote and I really like it, it states, "It is a human's ability to learn and to develop ideas alongside related behaviors that are inefficient or detrimental, that enables both adaptation and maladaptations." So these things happen in concert and then it's our ability and we can do it, we can think about these things we just have to. So I charge you to do that as we start to involve and engage in mature this field, and I just love this photo because it demonstrates that. You can see the forest through the trees there is a light at the end of the tunnel but there is also a lot of room there and that's exactly how we are in this field right now. So there is a lot of room for growth. You all are engaging in that growth just by taking this course, so we're at the beginning stages and you got to put in a lot of sweat equity right now and you're going to wade through things that are uncomfortable and unknown and you're going to have to create things that are new to you and you'll borrow from other areas but that's okay because that's the best way that we're going to be able to respond to this very timely challenge that we have. We can break through some of those barriers by utilizing our networks and leaning on each other and growing them. So I will be talking about some of the ways that you can grow those networks in our next video by talking about becoming a lifelong learner.
