Pathways of adaptation to external stressors in coastal natural-resource-dependent communities: Implications for climate change

Adaptation to climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing coastal communities today. Coastal communities are subject to a wide range of stressors related to climate change, including biological resource decline and natural hazards. Small historically natural-resource-dependent communities are particularly vulnerable because of their close reliance on ecosystem goods and services that are likely to be affected by climate change (e.g., fisheries, forests) and their limited access to outside technical and financial resources needed for adaptation. Exogenous adaptation policies, while helpful for fostering new behavioral adjustments to address resource decline and natural hazards, can in some cases exacerbate socioeconomic disruption, further burdening communities already struggling to adapt. This paper presents an investigation of how six historically natural-resource-dependent coastal communities in Oregon, USA, have experienced and responded to external stressors and how adaptation in these communities has been shaped by interactions between past and present practices, processes, and vulnerabilities. Despite climate-related impacts identified by the scientific community, climate change was not salient in the community members’ reports of stressors and impacts, and thus was not a trigger of adaptation. Rather, communities were responding to stressors associated with decades of declines in natural resource industries, an economic recession, restrictive natural resource management and land use policies, demographic change, and natural hazards. These findings confirm other research findings that chronic everyday problems, including those related to the maintenance of livelihoods, or consequences of inadequate livelihoods, often eclipse potentially disastrous threats in the minds of rural community members, thereby influencing adaptation strategies. In some cases communities do not prioritize such threats because people have come to accept living with them, or they feel powerless and unable to change the circumstances of daily life. The findings improve understanding of adaptation in natural-resource-based coastal communities in the USA and support the need for policy makers and planners to integrate climate change adaptation into livelihood improvement strategies.