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Effective climate change adaptation means supporting community autonomy

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Communities want to determine their own climate change adaptation strategies, and scientists and decision-makers should listen to them — both the equity and efficacy of climate change adaptation depend on it. We outline key lessons researchers and development actors can take to support communities and learn from them.

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Fig. 1: An illustration of our major points.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Attari for helpful discussion and M. Borgerhoff Mulder for helpful comments. We acknowledge funding from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (NSF award number 1639145).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Anne C. Pisor

  2. Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

    Anne C. Pisor & Elspeth Ready

  3. Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Beaufort, NC, USA

    Xavier Basurto

  4. Department of Anthropology, Institutes of Energy and the Environment and Rock Ethics Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Kristina G. Douglass

  5. Department of Environmental Science and Policy, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

    Katharine J. Mach

  6. Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

    Katharine J. Mach

  7. Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Elspeth Ready

  8. School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Jason M. Tylianakis

  9. The Francis I. Proctor Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Ashley Hazel

  10. Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University, London, UK

    Michelle A. Kline

  11. Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Karen L. Kramer

  12. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    J. Stephen Lansing

  13. Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    J. Stephen Lansing & James Holland Jones

  14. Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    J. Stephen Lansing

  15. Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Mark Moritz

  16. Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA

    Paul E. Smaldino

  17. Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, AK, USA

    Thomas F. Thornton

  18. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    James Holland Jones

Authors
  1. Anne C. Pisor
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  2. Xavier Basurto
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  3. Kristina G. Douglass
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  4. Katharine J. Mach
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  5. Elspeth Ready
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  6. Jason M. Tylianakis
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  7. Ashley Hazel
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  8. Michelle A. Kline
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  9. Karen L. Kramer
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  10. J. Stephen Lansing
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  11. Mark Moritz
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  12. Paul E. Smaldino
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  13. Thomas F. Thornton
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  14. James Holland Jones
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Contributions

Conceptualization: A.C.P., X.B., K.G.D., K.J.M., E.R., J.M.T., A.H., M.A.K., K.L.K., J.S.L., M.M., P.E.S., T.F.T., J.H.J.; funding acquisition: A.C.P., J.H.J.; project administration: A.C.P.; visualization: A.C.P., K.G.D.; writing — original draft: A.C.P.; writing — review and editing: A.C.P., X.B., K.G.D., K.J.M., E.R., J.M.T., A.H., M.A.K., K.L.K., J.S.L., M.M., P.E.S., T.F.T., J.H.J.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne C. Pisor.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Pisor, A.C., Basurto, X., Douglass, K.G. et al. Effective climate change adaptation means supporting community autonomy. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 213–215 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01303-x

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