Adaptation and resilience: a Sisyphean task?

In the ongoing efforts to mitigate and combat climate change impacts, adaptation and resilience are like a life sentence with no end in sight. Pakistan is no exception. The term ‘resilience’ is currently being used to praise the strength that communities and individuals display when overcoming their own vulnerability, while ‘adaptation’ is additional unpaid work they must undertake, such as securing homes, changing the cropping calendar, etc., mostly without assistance or protection from economic and political state systems. Vulnerable individuals, groups and communities have been mobilised for decades to work towards their own salvation to tame the climate carnage caused by the macroeconomic system and the powers that work around the clock to uphold it. I will argue that adaptation and resilience constitute a meaningless Sisyphean task in the global climate change governance system that exists today.

At the heart of understanding about how to tackle climate change is how it is communicated. Climate communication has been used as a tool to spread the notion that the most vulnerable need to work towards their own adaptation and resilience, alongside their regular painstaking livelihoods that are dependent on the natural forces of weather patterns, surface water temperatures and functions of biodiversity. Climate communication uses scientific information to generate awareness on risks, associated hazards and implications associated with climate change. Adaptation communication, however, is based on the adaptation needs of households and communities, in order to help people adapt to risks from climate change. In Pakistan over the last decade, since the destructive floods of 2010, the vulnerable have been expected to learn about dealing with current and upcoming climate change impacts on climate and adaptation communication while also being burdened with everyday survival, without direly needed social protections from the impacts as they keep happening. Some of these initiatives include the Climate Leadership for Effective Adaptation and Resilience (CLEAR) project that worked on the ground to create Local Adaptation Plans for Action in southern Sindh and Punjab. Others include the United Nations Development Programme’s Glacial Lake Outburst Floods Risk Reduction project in Northern Pakistan, the pilot phase for which was completed in 2016 and has since been scaled up between 2017 and 2024. While successes in these initiatives have shown some impeccable results (even the remotest of communities can now converse on climate change and its impacts), the situation is still just the tip of the iceberg.

How climate communication currently works

The usual communication steps in climate change projects begin with initiating organisations, usually non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs), communities and district administrations. In the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, over the last decade or more, climate change impacts are a widely accepted reality and adaptation is the desirable default status for countless communities. Development interventions in the sectors of agriculture, water management, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), education, livelihoods and humanitarian response have included integral focus on adaptation communication through varying tools – but the most vulnerable don’t have access to tools such as social media, smart phones or television. In the northern and central areas in Sindh, communication strategies since the 2010 floods have targeted small farmers, women farm labourers, fishing communities, students, market and farming associations, along with provincial and district administrative departments.

There are five problems with this communication model:

• It misses a key audience: local government representatives. Local government elections have suffered delays in the last three electoral regimes. A lack of local representatives in elected leadership leaves a large gap in the translation of community needs to the provincial and federal planning and development departments.
• Actual communication paths suffer from power plays. The path between local district administration and communities is broken as administration staff suffer from the delusion of knowing more about community needs. While these officers do consult communities when planning new projects and budgetary allocations, the process is not transparent. Regular consultations during project activities show breaks in the communication. In this case, CBOs and NGOs form an integral bridge but they are not a replacement for true direct communication.
• Project resources are not enough for a continued bridging between communities and officers thus the default broken connection remains.
• Adaptation communication in Pakistan mainly targets only the most vulnerable: small landholder farmers, livestock farmers, populations living below the poverty line, women, people with disability and, in some cases, ethnic and religious minorities. (A notable omission is that of transgender people, who are typically overlooked in disaster response and climate change communication.)
• There is a problem with misinformation. The spreading of misinformation has become rampant in these areas, most commonly from sources that intend to use it to manipulate people en masse on political and religious grounds. For example, some villages believed that the rain-fed floods of 2022 were caused by artificial rain being used as a weapon. There is no mainstream and consistent effort to counter the spread of such ‘fake news’.

In the past, small farmers with no more than five acres of land have been trained to change harvesting patterns, rely minimally on pesticides and plan sustainably for future harvests with a peripheral vision on the changing climate. CBOs made a remarkable impact by holding community awareness gatherings that also celebrated their achievements in the projects. New legislation led to the inclusion of women small landholder farmers in Sindh in decision-making bodies for water management in the province. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, natural resource management has also been the core of climate change adaptation, focusing on changing farming techniques, sustainable forest management, and risk communication and awareness through sessions on community-based disaster risk management. Similar approaches have been applied in Gilgit Baltistan.

However, the monsoons in 2024 showed that while people and communities have been actively involved in adaptation, in the absence of state-run adaptation initiatives, they are left to fend for themselves when climate anomalies strike. Pakistan’s first National Adaptation Plan was released in 2023, a seven-year course of action that is yet to find its footing. It is guided by the country’s climate change policy, updated in 2017, which still awaits mainstreaming.

Shifting adaptation strategy

The movement for adaptation slightly shifted after the superfloods of 2022. There is now enlarged focus on the conservation of natural resources, protection of biodiversity and ecosystems with projects such as Water Resource Accountability in Pakistan (WRAP), Recharge Pakistan and Biosaline Agriculture Programme by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Pakistan, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature Pakistan. WRAP conducts one of Pakistan’s first Nature-based Solutions (NbS) activities, with hybrid ( green and grey) solutions based on community needs through active consultation processes. Recharge Pakistan was launched in 2024 to reduce floods and replenish water through ecosystem-based watershed management and green infrastructure.

Adaptation communication is the key to success in all these projects, which also shows a shift in the conversation as direct stakeholders to these natural systems – the communities and district administrations – work together, but the agency for decision-making on what initiatives should be taken lies with the communities themselves. In the case of WRAP, participating communities have control over decisions on what can be translated as NbS activities based on their need and sustainability. Because NbS systems in WRAP are hybrid (containing both green and grey structures), the entirety of the responsibility for the green adaptation of ecosystems is shifted from small farmers, and focuses not on what is desirable but what is workable. Communities have amply communicated their limitations, shared their grievances and have shown the need for grey infrastructure to be built into green initiatives – not only is it more sustainable, but it also requires less maintenance, is less of a burden on an already deprived and burned- out population, and has the capacity to remain intact for longer periods. Communities have also taught us that when it comes to adaptation, scale matters more than size. It is easier to scale small changes in farming traditions rather than adopting larger, high-tech agricultural practices that may take more time to learn, time that can be better spent at adaptation planning and execution.

Limitations to progress

The communication strategy has seen a change in language whereby it has shifted its focus from ‘this is what we think can work for you to make you less vulnerable’, to ‘this is what can help you adapt but we want to know if this works for you – if not, how do we improve it?’. This shift gives true agency to the farmer to make decisions and does not pre-suppose that the farmer knows nothing about climate change and adaptation, allowing them to communicate other needs corresponding to social wellbeing (health, education, etc.) within the limitations they themselves have placed on the process.

Sadly, national and global conversations are still at a standstill today, as they have been for the last decade. While nations at COP28 recognised the phasing out of fossil fuels as integral to reversing global warming, they offered no concrete strategy to enforce this phase-out, not even those countries whose economies benefit so heavily from fossil fuels and which ‘coincidently’ include global powers in both the west and the east. Similarly, the establishment of a loss and damage fund was agreed to, but it may not be ready until 2025 ‘at the earliest’ to dispense funds to countries most vulnerable to climate change- induced extreme weather events, and as a result are constantly experiencing compound disasters.

Initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change and adaptation communications will not be effective on their own until significant changes happen at the national and global level. What we see in Pakistan is a disconnect as people continue to embrace adaptation, striving for resilience, while the systems of political economy still struggle to streamline it into a structured overarching resilience as part of the global system. COP provides hope for the possibility of systematic resilience. Until this disconnect is addressed and adaptation is mainstreamed through the labyrinth of multifaceted vulnerabilities, it will be impossible to keep this hope alive.

It is no longer solely the job of a small farmer to learn the risks attached with climate change. They have for a decade and more been working to adapt despite diminished resources and lack of social welfare, through severe conflicts, wars and damning disasters. No matter how many individuals, communities and resources we continue to mobilise for climate action, the global powers in the climate negotiations and conversations continue to ‘COP out’ of claiming responsibility for their role in the continuing climate carnage. The argument is not that individual action by masses cannot bring sustainability or build resilience, rather, it is important to set the stage to place the onus on the perpetrators not the victims, and hold responsible the world leaders who hesitate to do their part to effect change.

Fatima Yamin is a disasters and climate change expert based in Pakistan.