Rethinking Vulnerability in Climate Adaptation

This blog post is based on an article published in Social Policy and Society by Nasar Meer.

Described by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres as a “final warning,” the last Synthesis Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the latest clarion call for urgent action. It details how human activities have resulted in unprecedented (and in some respects irreversible) global warming, and warns that, barring a dramatic reduction in emissions, global average temperatures could rise beyond the 1.5°C threshold sooner than previously predicted. Recent extreme events – from record-shattering heatwaves across Europe and North America in the summers of 2022 and 2023, to catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, to intensifying wildfire seasons in many parts of the world – underscore the tangible impacts. The IPCC remains clear that surpassing 1.5°C will bring even more frequent and intense weather events, further ocean acidification, and irreversible biodiversity loss.

This is, however, a trajectory marked by a multifinality, where shared causes produce starkly different social, economic, and health outcomes around the globe.

For decades, scholars and practitioners from the Global South have pointed to the historical legacies of colonialism in shaping climate vulnerability and adaptation. They argue that approaches to climate change forged in the Global North – and advanced through international political and development agencies – are typically ahistorical and weighted in favour of those already better resourced. The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu frequently noted the ways “adaptation is becoming a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale.” 

Yet, adaptation efforts have only increased in rhetorical prominence. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), approximately 84% of countries have introduced a national instrument — a plan, law, strategy, or policy — designated for ‘adaptation’. The IPCC defines adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate change and its effects”.

This definition encompasses everything from individual behavioural changes (e.g., shading windows during heatwaves and using home energy efficiently) to population-level interventions (e.g., public education and large-scale infrastructure projects for hazard planning). Its broadness has allowed the language of “adaptation” to become highly malleable, taking on a chameleonic quality.

In the U.K., for example, adaptation is interwoven with decarbonization goals under the Climate Change Act 2008. While the Act sets a legally binding framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it also foregrounds adaptations such as improved inland flood defences, coastal erosion preparedness, and energy security measures. Its governance is partially devolved, and Scotland has its own statutory framework in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. However, across multiple levels of policymaking – local, regional, and national – adaptation policies frequently fail to recognise how social dynamics determine which groups are most vulnerable and why.

Following Kelly and Adger, vulnerability can be understood as “the ability or inability of individuals and social groupings to respond to, cope with, recover from, or adapt to, any external stress placed on their livelihoods and well-being.” This is distinct from simplistic predictions of likely adaptive behaviour; it involves structural factors that shape the capacity to adapt in the first place. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to reframe adaptation to climate change so that it explicitly integrates the social determinants of vulnerability—how race, class, gender, and other inequalities compound to determine differential exposures and uneven capacities for coping and recovery.

A growing body of data illustrates the depth of these disparities. For example, one U.K. based review found that Black people had 11 times less access to green space than white residents. These same communities also tend to be concentrated in urban heat islands, amplifying health risks during heatwaves and leading to higher rates of related co-morbidities. Socio-economic inequality continues to impede insulated housing and energy-efficient retrofits—even in high-income contexts—while gendered effects are evident in how violence against women and girls intensifies during heat events. The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) has highlighted how “spatial and gender relations are closely intertwined,” with climate impacts frequently worsening pre-existing vulnerabilities.

Yet, such insights are seldom registered in official adaptation strategies. In the U.K., the Technical Report for the third Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) identifies sixty-one cross-sector climate risks but does not address issues of race, ethnicity, or gender. The recent legal challenge against the U.K.’s National Adaptation Programme 3 (NAP3) argued that the program failed to assess the disproportionate effects on marginalised groups, including people with disabilities. Although the case was dismissed by the court, it highlights growing public awareness and insistence on equitable approaches to adaptation.

Fundamentally, these developments underscore that robust adaptation plans cannot treat climate impacts as universal or homogenous. Social disparities are intimately connected with health outcomes and must not be decoupled from inequalities in education, the criminal justice system, or child welfare. These domains are where inequalities often become entrenched and reproduced, shaping vulnerability over time. Incorporating a multidimensional view of vulnerability into adaptation strategies means recognising deep-seated inequality, its structural causes, and the ways it influences community resilience. On the one hand, this challenge urges climate change researchers and funders to prioritise primary research into how adaptation measures can explicitly address inequality across hazard planning, social vulnerability, and long-term risk assessments. On the other hand, it is an invitation to use the social and political sciences to connect up differential exposures, differential vulnerabilities, and differential access to resources and support – re-centring social dynamics and justice considerations in climate adaptation. It is only through this integrated perspective that adaptation becomes more than a perfunctory add-on to mitigation efforts – and instead becomes a transformative tool that addresses both the drivers of climate risks and the entrenched inequalities that determine who suffers first and worst.

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Reference

Meer, Nasar. 2025. “Social Policy and the Determinants of Vulnerability – Missing ‘Race’ in Climate Adaptation.” Social Policy and Society: 1–12. DOI: 10.1017/S1474746425000041.

About the author

Nasar Meer is Professor of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK.