Abstract
Many government officials and organizations have begun to consider climate resilience efforts to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events. Unfortunately, decision-makers have not yet developed a standardized approach. Since choosing a framework often requires significant time and resources, obtaining a better understanding of how often, and in what context, frameworks are currently used will likely save time for future decision-makers. In this literature review, we seek to determine whether certain commonly referenced frameworks (“triple value,” “triple bottom line,” “pressure state response (PSR),” “vulnerability,” and “risk”) are implemented more frequently than others, and if so, assess which attributes contribute to framework implementation. We obtained 212 relevant documents from one climate adaptation database, the Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse. We then implemented a simplified text classifier and employed statistical analysis to identify the use and frequency of key terms linked to specific frameworks. We found that four of the five frameworks (“triple bottom line,” “risk,” “vulnerability,” and “PSR”) appear in at least 7 % of the documents, suggesting that they are commonly used by decision-makers. On the other hand, the “triple value” framework does not appear to be frequently implemented by practitioners. Date of publication, discussion of social/cultural/financial sectors, discussion of the environmental sector, discussion of the infrastructure sector, discussion of human health/safety impacts, and discussion of ecosystem/biological impacts are all statistically significant factors in determining the implementation of the above frameworks. While current practices do not necessarily translate into future practices, the understanding of current practices as described in this study may help inform this future resilience framework.
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Notes
Note, a text classifier and a topic model are different. A text classifier is simply a sophisticated search engine that looks for user-supplied words or phrases. A topic model is a sophisticated frequency count algorithm that searches for how often certain terms occur and how they appear in relation to each other. We briefly examined a topic model for this work, but found our search terms were occurring too infrequently to make use of this, and therefore, we relied on a text classifier.
Initially we searched the papers for a specific phrase. This is the simplest technique, but is “rigid” in that any unexpected variation on the use of the phrase will not be counted. Thus we moved to a more complicated search algorithm.
While we considered nearness criterion that would check across multiple pages, we found this unnecessarily complicated the code. Since the probability of these events is similar across documents, we can still use this analysis to compare differences between papers.
KR-20 is a measure of internal consistency reliability for measures with dichotomous choices. Values can range from 0.00 to 1.00, where high values (e.g., >0.70 or >0.90) indicate that homogeneity is likely.
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Acknowledgments
The authors were supported by the Climate Decision Making Center (SES-0345798) and by the center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (SES-0949710), both through a cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University. Funding was also provided from the Steinbrenner Institute US Environmental Sustainability Fellowship and the Colcom Foundation. We would also like to thank the Georgetown Climate Center, and especially Aaron Ray, for their initial input on the project and for providing useful comments on our draft. Also, thanks for significant support and input from the Center for Clean Air Policy (2012) for initial discussions and research leading up to the development of this work.
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Markolf, S.A., Klima, K. & Wong, T.L. Adaptation frameworks used by US decision-makers: a literature review. Environ Syst Decis 35, 427–436 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-015-9572-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-015-9572-3