Understanding Climate Change Cascading Risks: Different Visions of the Future

The impacts from climate change flow-on and propagate across interconnected human and biophysical systems. These cascading impacts pose a unique and unprecedented challenge to decision-makers responsible for planning and implementing a climate change adaptation response in a timely manner. A growing body of theoretical and practical research on climate-related cascades is now available to support decision-making for adaptation. However, little is known about how local decisions-makers perceive cascading impacts and risks and how that shapes their adaptation response.

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand national climate change response, this case study investigates how considering impacts and risks from cascades shapes the adaptation response of local government and private sector actors in Te Tauihu-Nelson Tasman, a coastal region located in the northern parts of the South Island. Three research questions were asked: (1) how do actors from local government and private sector perceive and problematise cascading impacts and how that shapes their adaptation response? (2) What local climate change adaptation narratives emerge when these actors consider cascading impacts and risks? And (3) what are the similarities and differences between local, regional, and national adaptation narratives related to cascading impacts and risks? To answer these questions, seventeen participants from local government and the private sector took part in a workshop and semi-structured interviews. A riskscape narrative framework was used to make sense of how these participants perceived cascades and their implications, responded to the risks they pose and envisioned successful adaptation.

Findings first indicated that understanding cascades and their implications requires a technical and formal engagement with the concept. Second, while local government actors located in Te Tauihu-Nelson Tasman understand that adaptation to cascading impacts is a challenge needing proactive attention – particularly in raising community awareness of those risks–, the local private sector has not yet turned their mind to this challenge. Third, two common but diverging visions of adaptation co-exist at different levels of governance, somewhat in opposition: a vision of reorganisation of governance and economic systems, and a vision of de-complexification of vulnerable systems underpinned by a paradigm shift.

Notable implications of these findings are: (1) communicating risks from cascades to the public and the private sector needs to be accompanied by technical information to convey the significance of those risks and motivate adequate and effective responses, and (2) adaptation to cascading impacts is a whole-of-society project that requires alignment between all actors, so further research is needed to understand how these different visions can be reconciled.