Toward a Global Inventory of Climate Adaptations Based on Local Ways of Knowing: A Study of Adaptive Capacity Among Vulnerable Populations in Bangladesh and Haiti

For an ever-growing proportion of the world’s population, adaptation has taken on a new sense of urgency with the demands of global forces such as climate change. There is a great demand for understanding which aspects of inherently local adaptations are context-specific and when knowledge about adaptation in one geopolitical space could facilitate adaptation in another. We hypothesize that the creation of a global adaptation inventory (with corresponding taxonomy) could accelerate the exchange of successful adaptation practices across the global community. By leveraging prior work in Bangladesh, we seek to examine the universality (or lack thereof) of adaptation taxonomies through comparative research in Haiti, using a mixed approach, combining quantitative, statistical, ethnographic and qualitative methods. With a cost share from the Kellogg Institute, this project will prototype a universal taxonomy for climate change adaptation as the first step in promoting global exchange of adaptation strategies among vulnerable populations.