Question

Are the relative costs of outcomes high?
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Are the relative costs of outcomes high?

Now you have to consider whether the costs of an option (including opportunity costs) are high for the adaptation actor. If these costs are low, then it is appropriate to act, by deciding on an option, and then monitoring and possibly adjusting it ex post once impacts have begun to occur. This is in line with the adaptive management paradigm. If the relative costs of an option are high, then ex ante decision making frameworks are more appropriate (e.g. CBA, CEA, MCA) because the costs of maladaptation increase.

AP interactive decision tree - click any node to select it

When deciding based on the current situation only, the next decision node to consider is whether the costs of an option (including opportunity costs) are high. If these costs are low, then it is possible to experiment, that is to take adaptation action, monitor the outcome and then adjust the option ex-post once impacts have begun to occur. A farmer, for example, might plant a new seed variety. This is in line with the adaptive management paradigm (Holling 1978; Walters 1986), where most applications focus on the managements of ecosystems (e.g., Walters 1997).

If the relative costs of an option are high, experimentation is less desirable. If probabilistic information on current risks is at hand, an ex-ante evaluation of adaptation options should be undertaken by computing the expected outcomes following standard approaches for decision making under uncertainty such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) or cost effective analysis (CEA). For example, a seasonal forecast might provide a farmer with information about the likelihood of a wet growing season versus a normal growing season, which can then be combined with the cost of a given option to give the expected value for each option. Which of these expected outcome methods is appropriate depends on the outcome attributes of interest (see the Toolbox section on Formal decision-making).

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This section is based on the UNEP PROVIA guidance document

Criteria checklist

1. You want to appraise adaptation options.
2. The focus is either on collective actions and there are no conflicting interests of private actors, or the focus is on individual collective actions.
3. Decisions can be formalised.
4. Either the set of options includes only short term ones or residual impacts can not be projected.
5. There are risks are due to current climate variability.
6. As a next step you are faced with the question whether the relative costs of outcomes are high.