Global Change and the Caribbean: Adaptation and Resilience

By David Barker

This is the fifth in a series of volumes published by UWI Press exploring how geographical and cognate research is being applied to address key environmental problems in the Caribbean region. Global Change and the Caribbean highlights how current research is addressing the consequences of change, forced by global warming and climate change, and driven by globalization and population growth. The book takes forward issues of regional and community vulnerability, and focuses on the search for solutions in terms of adaptation, resilience and societal transformation.

The question of transformation is debated by authors and the editors in drawing together the prospects for regional and community resilience. The chapters are presented as a series of original, empirical research contributions which have the common theme of the search for development strategies that focus on social and economic needs of the people without further deterioration of the region’s fragile environmental resource base.

The book will be essential reading at first-degree and master’s levels in institutions with Caribbean-focused courses relating to geography, and in multidisciplinary areas such as development studies, social studies, environmental management, planning and resource management. The approaches and case studies presented here will be of significant interest to regional planners, resource management specialists and public sector officials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9789766406028

Book preview

Figures

Figure 2.1 Classic diagram of an adaptive cycle

Figure 2.2 Panarchy diagram of adaptive cycles in the insular Caribbean

Figure 2.3 Former Bath Hotel, Nevis, now used for government offices

Figure 2.4 Remnants of the Royal Victoria Hotel, first luxury hotel in the Bahamas, as seen in the early 1980s

Figure 2.5 Remains of the once-prominent city of St Pierre, Martinique

Figure 2.6 Sketch of the lower-town warehouse district of Oranjestad, St Eustatius, during its heyday prior to the sacking of the town by the British in 1781

Figure 2.7 The largely abandoned lower town of Oranjestad, St Eustatius, as it appears today

Figure 2.8 Final stage of a model of urban development in a Caribbean island

Figure 3.1 Map of the study area, southern St Elizabeth parish and Jamaica

Figure 3.2 Scallions from the same field in the Junction

Figure 3.3 A guinea grass field on fire and the aftermath of fire

Figure 4.1 Matrix for the intersection of relative levels of sensitivity and adaptive capacity to high-speed winds

Figure 4.2 Matrix for the intersection of relative levels of sensitivity and adaptive capacity for exposure to high-speed winds and reinsurance rates

Figure 5.1 Location of air- and seaports in St Kitts

Figure 5.2 Tourist arrivals by air for St Kitts for the period 1995–2010

Figure 5.3 Tourism industry contribution to annual GDP in St Kitts

Figure 6.1 Location of four study-area communities in Jamaica

Figure 6.2 Jamaica’s agroecological zones

Figure 6.3 Pattern of vulnerability components for each community

Figure 6.4 Biophysical exposure of each community

Figure 6.5 Perceived differences in rainfall in each community

Figure 7.1 Old Harbour Bay fishing village, Jamaica

Figure 7.2 Distribution of respondents who engage in different adjustment strategies

Figure 7.3 Distribution of reasons why respondents do not engage in adjustment strategies

Figure 8.1 A conceptual framework demonstrating how social capital has been positioned to counter the negative effects of neoliberalism

Figure 8.2 Location of sampled Fair Trade groups in St Lucia

Figure 8.3 Sign on one farmer group’s office

Figure 8.4 Location of case study communities in Kingston

Figure 8.5 Inscriptions observed on a wall in Brooklyn, Arnett Gardens

Figure 8.6 Inscription observed on a wall in Havana, Arnett Gardens

Figure 8.7 Inscriptions observed on wall at the entrance to Morgan’s Lane, Grants Pen

Figure 9.1 Location of study-area communities in St Vincent

Figure 9.2 Assistance received from relatives living outside the household

Figure 9.3 Level of dependency on assistance from relatives outside the household

Figure 9.4 Model depicting a disconnect between bonding and linking capital within the communities

Figure 10.1 Dominica and its three national parks

Figure 10.2 World Heritage Sites in the wider Caribbean

Figure 10.3 Ecotourism activities in and around Dominica’s World Heritage Sites

Figure 10.4 Draft of a National Geographic Geotourism MapGuide for Dominica’s World Heritage Sites and environs

Figure 11.1 The North Rupununi region of Guyana and villages participating in the research

Figure 11.2 Main themes for viability at the community level, North Rupununi, Guyana

Figure 11.3 Main themes for viability at the regional Guiana Shield level

Figure 12.1 The design charrettes’ participants used colour-coded Post-it notes to spatially locate the assets and vulnerabilities

Figure 12.2 Proposals for a biodegradable carpet to facilitate the regeneration of the mangrove forests

Figure 12.3 The links between the well-being of the mangrove forests and the reefs

Figure 13.1 Location of study-area communities in Guyana and Suriname

Tables

Table 3.1 Comparison of 2014 observed monthly precipitation for thirteen rain gauges in southern St Elizabeth parish with thirty-year monthly mean

Table 3.2 Observed soil moisture levels for Hounslow and Flagaman for June 2013 and 2014

Table 5.1 Comparison of the vulnerability capacity assessment technique used in this research to the adaptation guidelines for ports by the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility

Table 5.2 Respondents’ knowledge about climate change

Table 5.3 Sources of information about climate change

Table 6.1 Project communities and their associated agroecological zones

Table 6.2 Vulnerability indicators

Table 6.3 Vulnerability component scores at the community level

Table 6.4 Hazard impacts and coping strategies

Table 7.1 Macrocomponents and related microcomponents of the climate change vulnerability index (CC_V) developed for fishers in Old Harbour Bay, Jamaica

Table 7.2 Demographic frequencies for sample of Old Harbour Bay, Jamaica fishers

Table 7.3 Frequencies and distribution for levels of vulnerability to climate change within Old Harbour Bay, Jamaica

Table 9.1 Type of labour used by farmers

Table 10.1 Important characteristics of sustainable ecotourism destinations

Table 11.1 Examples of system viability indicators developed at community level

Table 12.1 Number of participants and teams in each of the four design charrettes

Table 12.2 Strengths in the SWOT analysis for the priority area natural assets identified in the design charrettes

Table 12.3 Weaknesses in the SWOT analysis for the priority area natural assets identified in the design charrettes

Table 12.4 Opportunities in the SWOT analysis for the priority area natural assets identified in the design charrettes

Table 12.5 Threats in the SWOT analysis for the priority area natural assets identified in the design charrettes

Table 13.1 Sample size selected for communities

Table 13.2 Aggregated percentages for statements on perceptions for 2012

Table 13.3 Some perceptions of effects of climate change on household activities in 2012

Table 13.4 Coping mechanisms for adapting to climate change in 2012

Preface

This volume is the fifth in a series of books arising from the British-Caribbean Geography Seminar (BCGS) Series. The chapters have been selected from among the thirty-seven papers presented at the sixth BCGS held at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in June 2014. The papers have been suitably revised and edited for publication. The theme of the meeting and the title of the book, Global Change and the Caribbean: Adaptation and Resilience, focus on the reaction of human systems in the face of global change as it affects the Caribbean.

The seminar series was inspired originally by the successful Overseas Seminars promoted by the then Institute of British Geographers during the 1970s and 1980s. It has gone from strength to strength and is the only one to last into the new century. This is a fact recognized by the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, as it lent its prestigious support to the series, in the present case through seed corn grants from its Developing Areas and Climate Change Research Groups. The Jamaica National Foundation contributed funds towards the publication costs of this book while project funds from USAID supported Caribbean Geography volume 20, a companion publication which contains papers presented by a selection of postgraduates at the sixth BCGS meeting.

The aims of the sixth BCGS, as in previous meetings, was to bring together geographers and researchers from cognate disciplines to exchange ideas and present their research; to provide a platform for younger researchers to present their work to a professional audience, perhaps for the first time; and to focus on Caribbean environments. This meeting involved over fifty participants and papers presented ranged across the geographical spectrum from subregional climate prediction to the social impacts of environmental change and economic globalization. Once again, the meeting had a truly international flavour, including presenters from eight Caribbean territories (Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, St Kitts/Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Canada and Colombia. Other participants in attendance were from Antigua and Martinique. Although the majority of participants were geographers, the disciplines of geology, anthropology, development studies and environmental studies were represented, together with contributions from outside the tertiary academic sector – schoolteaching, international conservation NGOs and research institutes, and government departments of meteorology, environment and education.

The research themes established for the first conference in 1992 have evolved over a period of more than two decades, and this progression is discussed in previous publications in the series. For this conference the organizers were particularly keen to build on the momentum from the 2006 meeting. It was held under the theme of Global Change and Caribbean Vulnerability, and publications from the meeting appeared in a book of the same title published by the University of the West Indies Press in 2009. In that volume, the complexities of responses to the combined forces of global change, that is, environmental processes such as climate change and climate hazards, and economic processes such as globalization and trade liberalization, were highlighted through case studies drawn from across the region. Since then, there has been a shift in the research agenda and the wider literature towards how these factors provide opportunities and set constraints in the way societies adapt to and develop resilience to global change. The latter were some of the issues we asked participants to address in their presentations.

As in the previous volumes, the chapters here have been subjected to a rigorous peer-review process. Authors of conference papers selected for the volume were invited to submit manuscripts based on their presentations, and these were reviewed by the editors and selected referees. Changes were then requested for each of the submitted chapters to ensure quality and consistency in the collection, as well as to help elucidate the main themes of the book. Next, the publishers engaged independent, external reviewers who made general comments on the collection and specific comments on each chapter. Both authors and editors then went through another round of changes, trimming, extending and generally fine-tuning the collection. We feel confident that this rigorous two-step review process has produced another volume of high-quality papers.

This University of the West Indies Press publication, Global Change and the Caribbean: Adaptation and Resilience (Barker, McGregor, Rhiney and Edwards 2016), and the special issue of Caribbean Geography (volume 20, 2015) brings to an end the involvement of the senior editors (Barker and McGregor). The overall number of book chapters and Caribbean Geography articles published from the BCGS meetings is 114, out of a total of 181 papers presented at the six meetings. More than 40 publications have at least one author who was a postgraduate at the time of the conference, usually the presenter, and this represents around a third of the publications from the series. It is to this generation of scholars that the series editors will look to take up the baton for the future.

David Barker

Duncan McGregor

Kevon Rhiney

Thera Edwards

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank a number of institutions and individuals for their assistance and support in facilitating the Sixth British Caribbean Geography Seminar and associated publications, held at the University of the West Indies Mona campus in July 2014. The Jamaica National Foundation graciously donated funds towards the cost of this book, and USAID made project funds available to help defray the cost of publishing the special issue of Caribbean Geography (volume 20, 2015), the other publication associated with the meeting. The Developing Areas Research Group and the Climate Change Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers each donated £250, as pump-priming funds. The Dean’s Office of the University of the West Indies Faculty of Science and Technology supported the meeting by waiving the rental charges for hire of the Inter-Faculty Lecture Theatre. The administrative staff and geography postgraduates of the Department of Geography and Geology at Mona are thanked for their invaluable assistance, especially during registration and throughout the week of the meeting, and special thanks to undergraduate geography students Franz Brown and Tashanna Walker. Barbara McNeish provided funds to help defray the costs of the conference reception held on College Common. On our rural field trip across the Blue Mountains, David and Dorothy Twyman, the owners of Old Tavern Coffee Estate, provided wonderful hospitality and an informative tour of the coffee estate. David Martin organized the tour of the Jamaica Producers farm at Agualta Vale in St Mary, and Chris Martin, the farm manager, and his staff provided a fascinating tour of the facilities and welcome refreshments. Blue Mountain Downhill Bicycle Tours are thanked for allowing us to use their facility for our lunch stop. Many of the maps and diagrams have been drawn or redrawn by Jenny Kynaston, Geography Department, Royal Holloway, University of London.

David Barker

Duncan McGregor

Kevon Rhiney

Thera Edwards

INTRODUCTION

1

Adaptation and Resilience

Changing Caribbean Perspectives

Duncan McGregor, David Barker, Kevon Rhiney and Thera Edwards

Since the onset of economic globalization in the 1980s, the Caribbean region has entered a new era of economic and environmental vulnerability quite different in scope from that of the colonial period. The two principal external forces of global change which have articulated these vulnerabilities can be broadly characterized as economic globalization and climate change. Geographers Robin Leichenko and Karen O’Brien (2008) use the term double exposure to refer to the transformative processes of global change which affect environmental and social systems. The term encapsulates a range of external economic and environmental forces which interact in complex ways and have differential impacts on places, people, groups and institutions. When these forces are considered together rather than in isolation, they have the potential to amplify benefits or losses to the winners and losers, that is, those places or people exposed to such external stresses and shocks.

In the Caribbean region, double exposure is evident in all territories, in all sectors of the economy and in rural spaces and urban spaces. The Caribbean is well recognized as a region of vulnerable small island developing states (e.g., McGregor and Barker 2003; Dulal et al. 2009; Nicholls et al. 2011; Nurse et al. 2014), so, not surprisingly, it has felt the full force of double exposure over the last twenty-five years. In many ways it has become an ideal arena for empirical research on the impacts of global change and double exposure. This volume, like the previous book in the series (McGregor, Dodman and Barker 2009), adds to the burgeoning Caribbean research output on global change and Caribbean vulnerability. Leichenko and O’Brien (2008, 4) comment that one thing that is different about global change in the twenty-first century is the speed, scale and extent to which it affects biophysical, social and ecological systems. This is especially true of the Caribbean. In some ways, the dynamic nature of the environmental and societal processes which impact the region is mirrored by the rapidly changing agenda of researchers and development practitioners studying these phenomena. The present volume captures this rapidly evolving research enterprise. In our previous book (McGregor, Dodman and Barker 2009) research contributions mainly addressed the multiple dimensions and impacts of Caribbean vulnerability, at different spatial scales and in fields such as domestic food security, environmental management and urban systems. This collection also embraces the theme of global change and Caribbean vulnerability, but it goes further to reflect the evolving research agenda and places greater emphasis on studying adaptation and resilience, particularly at the community level.

This is the fifth volume in a series published by the University of the West Indies Press in which environmental and developmental research in the Caribbean has been highlighted. In the earlier volumes, current geographical research was incorporated into themes such as sustainable development, resource sustainability, small islands and development, with the threat of environmental hazards such as tropical storms and hurricanes forming an ever-present but subtly changing background (Barker and McGregor 1995; McGregor, Barker and Lloyd Evans 1998; Barker and McGregor 2003). These themes were taken forward in the fourth volume, Global Change and Caribbean Vulnerability (McGregor et al. 2009), which highlighted the complexity of response to the natural and socioeconomic forces of globalization within the Caribbean region.

However, as McGregor et al. (2009) noted, in recent years the impact of economic globalization has increased the pace of change and introduced new challenges for Caribbean people and nations. Trade liberalization and the global reach of multinationals have compounded the vulnerability of island economies and people’s livelihoods, especially in the field of agriculture (Barker 2012). McGregor et al. (2009) emphasized how Caribbean vulnerabilities could be related to the factors of global change, with environmental factors of global warming and climate change interacting with economic and societal factors of globalization and population growth; the double exposure of Leichenko and O’Brien (2008). Since then, there has been a shift in the research agenda and wider literature towards how these factors provide opportunities and set constraints in how society adapts and develops resilience to global change (see, e.g., Nelson et al. 2007; Pelling 2011; O’Brien 2012; Kates et al. 2012). This transition is the principal focus of the present volume.

Adaptation, Resilience and Transformation

There are numerous definitions of adaptation, resilience and transformation in the recent literature, and rather than rehearse these here, we will use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014a) definitions, bearing in mind that these are focused primarily on the response to climate change and do not directly address exposure to economic globalization. To quote:

Adaptation: the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.

Resilience: The capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation.

Transformation: A change in the fundamental attributes of natural and human systems. Within this summary, transformation could reflect strengthened, altered, or aligned paradigms, goals, or values towards promoting adaptation for sustainable development, including poverty reduction. (IPCC 2014a, 5)

Arising from research and debates on vulnerability has been a new arena of debate on what precisely adaptation implies, with much discussion of a new paradigm – transformation (Pelling 2011; Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete 2011; Kates et al. 2012; O’Brien 2012, 2013; Matyas and Pelling 2015). These debates are reflected in this volume. According to Pelling (2011, 55), the IPCC (2008) definition of resilience placed emphasis on adaptive capacities. Adaptive capacity is a critical consideration when considering community vulnerability in the face of change. Brooks et al. (2005, 153) define adaptive capacity as the ability to design and implement effective adaptation strategies in the attempt to reduce the likelihood of negative outcomes from climate-related hazards. This has implications for achieving adaptation as well and is contingent on a number of interlinked factors that can either constrain or enable a system’s ability to adapt. Key among these are a system’s capacity to re-adjust itself, which is dependent on a range of factors, including institutional capacity, governance, culture and the degree of access to needed financial and other resources (Wise et al. 2014). Climate adaptation cannot be divorced from the cultural, economic, cultural, political and environmental contexts in which it occurs, and it is therefore part of a broader set of societal responses to change (see Leach et al. 2010; Pelling 2011; O’Brien 2012; Wise et al. 2014). At the local scale, the ability to adapt to future climatic changes is inherently developmental and is based on prevailing societal norms, power structures, social and economic conditions and entrenched cultural practices. The social conditions under which people live, the level of reliance on land-based resources, divergent levels of government support and the amount of assets available and accessible by individuals or local communities, all create differentiated levels of exposure and sensitivity to climate-induced hazards.

Adaptation can be seen as a subset of resilience, contributing to the maintenance of systems integrity. Nelson et al. (2007) discuss the ways in which adaptive capacity in the face of environmental change can contribute to increased resilience. They see this as a systems-oriented and dynamic process, distinguishing between incremental adjustments and more radical transformational change. They point out that societies have the capability to actively work towards transformational change, which can, of course, involve social capital (loosely defined as inter- and intracommunity support networks which act to benefit individuals and community groups) during that process.

This in many respects follows from Holling’s observations that natural systems are characterized by change rather than equilibrium (Holling 1973). The resilience framework incorporates the concept of complex systems, and emphasizes the links between ecological and social systems (Nelson et al. 2007). They argue that adaptation should be regarded not only in terms of the specific activity but how that activity feeds back into the social as well as the environmental system. Social capital has often been regarded as a moderating influence, serving to maintain the status quo, but is also an important agency in initiating or managing change.

There is a general assumption that adaptation decisions can be managed in a traditional risk framework (that is both linear and normative in nature). As such, adaptation efforts have tended to be problem oriented and reductionist in approach (Ostrom 2010; Wise et al. 2014). Additionally, there are many instances where research and planning efforts to support adaptation action have adopted approaches based on the assumption that a clearly identifiable rational decision maker exists with the mandate to make decisions. In reality, adaptation planning is expected to take place in a landscape of increasing complexity that is shaped by multiple actors with different self-interests, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability.

Yet successive adaptations can clearly lead to incremental changes in the underlying social system – a form of transformation. Pelling (2011, 56) points out that adaptation as resilience can allow unsustainable physical or social practices to persist – a point made by a number of presenters at our 2014 meeting – thus in the longer term undermining systems viability, while giving the impression of meeting the demands environmental change imposes on the system.

Despite this, we would argue that social capital is a key plank in maintaining systems viability, in that it buffers shocks and stresses and better allows the community as a whole to adapt to changing environmental circumstances. Key to this is the nature of external intervention, be it aid from international institutions, governmental legislation, NGO activity or remittances, to name some. But external intervention such as structural adjustment frequently comes with caveats, and with demands that the system changes or at least modifies its behaviour. This appears to lead to transformation, and potentially non-reversible systems behavioural change.

Pelling (2011, 50) argues that adaptation can intervene in development, through enabling resilience, transition or transformation. Transformation, however, implies directional and possibly irreversible change, together with significant alteration of systems behaviour, be it political structures, economic frameworks or even community structures and livelihoods. In terms of a structural adjustment approach, it is easy to impose conditions on which development loans may be granted but less easy to accurately quantify the effects those conditions may have on communities and livelihoods structures.

The question then is transformation for whom? While governments and international institutions may perceive imposed systems transformation as beneficial, this may not be felt at the local community level. Put another way, an external intervention which results in a transformation may not be scale neutral. The impacts at, say, a community scale may be different from those designed for the national level.

Clearly, social capital is important in this, as it relates to the community’s ability to respond to stresses of whatever nature and to its resilience in the face of those stresses. Social capital structures are often strong, but they may be fragile. They are often at their strongest in the aftermath of disaster, frequently in the face of inadequate governmental or external intervention. Yet disasters are often the threshold to transition, if not to transformation, in that they create instability and thus may provide an opportunity for change at all levels from local to international. There have been too many examples of well-meaning but ill-judged interventions (see Pelling 2011, table 5.2, for examples) for transformation to be espoused in a top-down manner when dealing with community livelihoods and social structures. The case for transformation, as opposed to adaptation, remains in our view unproven in the Caribbean context.

Climate Scenarios and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

Warming of the climate system is now regarded by IPCC as unequivocal (IPCC 2014a, 4), although it acknowledges substantial decadal and interannual variability. In terms of the Caribbean Basin, critical issues are the effects this global-scale warming is having on temperatures, precipitation, storm events and sea-level rise. Reviews of the literature (e.g., Gamble 2009; Taylor et al. 2012; Rhiney 2015) indicate that the basin is not reacting to climate change in a uniform manner, despite a general consensus that the Caribbean is experiencing a more variable climate of stronger dry season droughts and more stormy wet season conditions. For example, climate modelling suggests that while the northern Caribbean is projected to have a wetter November to January period, the southern Caribbean is projected to be drier (J.D. Campbell et al. 2010); while Gamble (2009) also notes an already deepening midsummer drought. Taylor et al. (2012) point out that while published research supports the concept of increased tropical cyclone intensity, there is much less consensus about hurricane frequency.

In an in-depth discussion of the prospects for effective adaptation to climate change, the 2014 IPCC Synthesis Report (IPCC 2014b) points out that there are limits to the effectiveness of adaptation, especially with greater magnitudes and rates of climate change. Many of the uncertainties in future Caribbean climate relate to the nature of small island systems. Nurse et al. (2014, 1620) point out that change in human settlement patterns and in socioeconomic conditions in small islands particularly impact on the effects of climate change such as rising sea level. That such interactions make interpretation of the effects of climate change difficult to predict is illustrated, for example, by Novelo-Casanova and Suarez (2010) in the case of the Cayman Islands.

Taking Forward the Research Agenda

Issues identified at our 2006 meeting (Dodman et al. 2009) were intended to set the broad geographical research agenda, in an attempt to focus holistic approaches on tackling vulnerabilities in the region, and from that platform, to move beyond vulnerability into adaptation and resilience. We were encouraged that many of the participants at the 2006 meeting were already operating within that framework, while we noted that issues relating in particular to the need for more research at the physical/human interface and greater use of longitudinal data sets were conspicuous by their absence.

Dodman et al. (2009) discussed a number of issues in an attempt to focus the geographical research agenda beyond the 2006 meeting. Three of these issues emerge in the chapters in this volume, and its companion special issue of Caribbean Geography (volume 20, 2015), which showcases research undertaken by completing or recently completed postgraduates from within the region. These issues were

•a need for an appropriate research framework;

•a need for more research into social capital and its use in building resilience; and

•a need for more participatory (action) research into community practices and attitudes.

With respect to the need for an appropriate research framework, Dodman et al. (2009, 370) suggested political ecology (see, e.g., Bryant and Bailey 1997; Stott and Sullivan 2000). Such a framework seeks to link social and economic processes to the transformation of the physical environment, thus helping to identify those people most at risk in the face of physical and socioeconomic change. Political ecology’s focus on the cross-scalar struggle over resources and how the costs and benefits of environmental change are distributed unevenly can reveal unequal vulnerabilities among different social groups.

While reference was made to political ecology during the 2014 meeting, double exposure was a more popular holistic framework in the research reported at the meeting, as reflected in Knudson (chapter 4), Rhiney et al. (chapter 6) and Baptiste (chapter 7) in this volume, and in several articles in the companion special issue of Caribbean Geography. Researchers engaged in community-level research are mainly engaging the seminal argument of O’Brien and Leichenko (2000) that the twin drivers of change are rooted in the physical environment (global warming) and the socioeconomic environment (globalization, including neoliberalism and trade liberalization). It is the combined effects of these drivers which are critical in determining and potentially compounding vulnerability at the community and individual level. Double exposure is an especially appropriate research framework in the insular Caribbean at the community level because it brings together the growing unpredictability in the climatic and economic environment, the use of scarce and fragile land resources, and the vulnerability of rural livelihoods to external shocks and stresses. The focus on external shocks and stresses is much more explicit in double exposure than in the political ecology approach. The latter is perhaps more appropriate for studies of the vulnerabilities of social groups that combine national and community scales of analysis to examine the unequal access to resources which arise from asymmetric power relations between local communities and larger public and private institutions.

With respect to the other two issues, the need for more research on social capital and its role in building resilience and the need for more participatory action research into community practices, these are reflected in last two sections of the book, devoted to social capital and participatory approaches, and are briefly introduced in the relevant sections below.

Adaptation and Resilience: Changing Caribbean Perspectives

Approaches to the study of Caribbean vulnerabilities to global change have taken many forms. They partly depend on the disciplinary background of researchers and on their particular topical interest. They can reflect the geographical scale of analysis (region, national, rural or urban community), an economic sector (agriculture, tourism, infrastructure) or a biophysical system, and they tend to address the social vulnerabilities of particular groups, people and institutions. This is not to