Response to environmental change is captured by the concepts of mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation refers to actions that reduce exposure to changes, for example, through regulation, location, or technological shifts. Adaptation refers to the adjustments that populations take in response to current or predicted change. Mitigation, however, is insufficient to fully protect or buffer populations from change, and recent literature is replete with examples of drastic, often irreversible, changes (see, for example, Reference 6). In response to the increased awareness of change (6, 7), there has been a corresponding increase in documented efforts to ameliorate risk through adaptation actions (3, 6, 8, 9). Researchers and policy makers are working to identify analytical frameworks that provide the necessary tools for analyzing human adaptations in light of current and future environmental change (8). The first step in this analysis has often been identification of vulnerabilities to change (10–12); a key objective of most adaptation actions is the reduction in vulnerability. Much emerging evidence inevitably shows that adaptation actions concentrate on where immediate benefits can be gained and actors can mobilize resources, but persistent and intractable vulnerabilities often remain despite much adaptation actions.
