Unintended consequences of climate change adaptation: African case studies and typologies on pitfalls and windfalls

Climate change adaptation concerns mechanisms for responding to local climate change impacts to improve livelihoods of and decrease risks to affected stakeholders. In this article, we present evidence and novel insights from selected climate change adaption cases studies in Sub-Saharan Africa, shared directly by climate change practitioners. Our aim is to foster awareness and comprehension for local, national and transnational actors, enabling better decision-making, project implementation and policy design. To achieve this we describe and assess positive spillovers and negative externalities of climate change adaptation. Building on our collection of case studies, we focussed on classifying adaptation projects according to a set of typologies identified by the researchers. To further explain the typology classification related to the occurrence of (un)intended (side) effects, we identified factors that may enable sustainable adaptation scenarios based on lessons shared about the investigated projects. These systems are based on existing political economic research on the state-of-the-art ‘4E’– method (representing enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, entrenchment) evident in the literature and case study applications, which we adapted to fit our research questions. The factors include collaboration across scales, data availability and learning, bottom-up involvement/participation. We also formulated the positive counterpart of each of the four E dimensions. One finding was that the category lose-win, where the intended goal was not achieved, yet a positive spillover occurred, would be more likely to emerge with the factors ‘bottom-up participation’ as well as ‘learning across scales’ being present.HighlightsShow climate change adaptation as a critical concern for both local contexts and migration scenariosIdentify evidence of potential pitfalls in planning and implementation that can arise given uncertain changes either in external factors beyond the control of adaptation stakekholders, as well as what lies within the control of climate change adaptation projects, but might not have been foreseen/foreseeableMeasuring, describing and explaining the extent and quality of unintended side effects of climate adaptationRecommend ways to ameliorate potential side effects by better employing available resources