Prioritizing climate adaptation limits and trade-offs

The impacts of climate change are growing increasingly severe, and human communities must adapt to avoid these impacts. However, adaptation options are limited by constraints, which are both natural, or ‘hard’, and social, or ‘soft’. Fundamental transformation of social systems and structures can expand these limits by adding adaptive capacities. However, such transformations may also negatively affect the communities whose adaptive capacities they are intended to expand. This article argues that transformational adaptation should take these negative effects into account by considering the value that soft adaptation limits have for communities. According to the no-harm principle, the transformation of what we term ‘devalued’ soft adaptation limits should be prioritized over the transformation of ‘valued’ ones. However, this general recommendation for action does not suffice to deal with value conflicts where trade-offs must be made. We suggest that giving the highest priority to basic human needs is a first step towards solving this issue.