Enhancing Climate Change Adaptation through Amartya Sen's Capability Approach

Description

Abstract
Climate events can profoundly affect the capabilities and wellbeing of individuals and communities, impacting their daily lives. These impacts are unevenly distributed, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities, inequalities, and inequities. Understanding the multidimensional impact of these events is crucial for developing inclusive and equitable climate adaptation policies. In the literature, social and distributional impacts of climate events are often overshadowed by the economic impacts. Recently there have been calls from the scientific community to develop a comprehensive index that gauges the overall impact (including societal) of climate events on human wellbeing for informing policy making better.

This paper tries to address this gap by applying Amartya Sen's capability approach for gauging the impact of climate events on human wellbeing. The capabilities approach focuses on what individuals can achieve (called functionings) given their available resources. An individual’s capabilities are the choice set of functionings (e.g., being physiologically and mentally healthy, being sheltered, being mobile, being educated etc.) available to that person. Personal, social, and environmental factors influence their ability to convert resources into functionings (called conversion factors). Adaptation to climate events depends on existing capabilities, and climate extreme events reduce capabilities through lost opportunities and diminished ability. Recovery needs financial and institutional support that can equitably enhance capabilities. Therefore, the capabilities approach provides a robust framework for identifying and measuring the societal, distributional, and economic impacts of climate events on the wellbeing of diverse populations. It does so by analysing changes in individuals' overall capabilities, encompassing broader wellbeing dimensions like health, shelter, mobility, education, etc.

We propose a Wellbeing Index (WI) based on this capability approach. In this presentation we will discuss the process of selecting crucial capabilities for the wellbeing analysis. The proposed WI will be applied to Danish case studies to ensure its relevance and effectiveness for informing policy and decision-making processes.

Period	23 Aug 2024
Event title	The Danish Environmental Economic Conference 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Skodsborg, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National