Essays on Adaptation and Behavioural Responses to Abrupt Changes

Abstract

Humanity is currently facing a range of interconnected socio-ecological challenges, including climate change, economic instability, social crises, and pandemics. These issues often lead to abrupt changes, demanding the development of effective adaptation mechanisms to mitigate their impacts, particularly when they threat human survival. Hence, it is important to improve the understanding of adaptation, and identify the mechanisms driven its process. This thesis aims to advance the knowledge in this area by developing methodologies for assessment and exploring the influence of culture and risk preferences on the adaptation process.

Chapter 2 introduces an analytical framework to assess adaptation. This framework develops a metric to assess adaptation in a coupled human-ecological system. It derives driver-specific adaptation responses and disentangles the concepts of adaptation, sensitivity and total impact. The framework is applied to a calibrated bio-economic model focusing on the North Sea flatfish fishery. The case study demonstrates how fishers adapt through effort to three different changes in drivers and illustrates their differentiated effects on quantities supplied in the market.

Chapter 3 adopts an interdisciplinary approach to assess adaptation, using the conceptual representation of a socio-ecological system and the Ostrom Framework. The case study examines German flatfish fisheries and identifies the strategies they employed to persist despite the numerous challenges they encounter. Among the strategies, cultural traditions and self-identification as a fisher, rather than an entrepreneur, play and important role to foster adaptation. Recognizing the importance of culture in adaptation, chapter 4 examines the role of cultural heritage from a consumer perspective. This chapter 4 focuses on the German brown shrimp fishery, the most important coastal fishery in Germany. Using a discrete choice experiment, this chapter estimates the willingness to pay of tourists and locals to preserve the cultural heritage of the shrimp fishery. The target population is drawn from four towns in Germany -Ditzum, Busum, Cuxhaven, and Gretsiel- recognized for preserving the traditional practices. The findings reveal that individuals in these areas value maritime cultural heritage, along with other attributes of this fishery, such as its environmental sustainability.

The final chapter explores the role of risk preferences on the adaptation process, focusing on the post-impact phase following an abrupt change. Using the 2023 Turkey earthquake as a case study, this chapter investigates how individual risk preferences shift in response to the disaster. Through a combination of surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments involving over 600 participants - including both survivors of the earthquake and residents of unaffected cities in Turkey - the study reveals that individuals heavily impacted by the earthquake tend to become more risk-tolerant, with gender and damage level as significant factors influencing their responses.

In summary, this thesis investigates adaptation by integrating analytical and experimental methodologies. It develops metrics for assessing adaptation and examines the influence of culture and risk preferences on the adaptation process. By employing a variety of methodologies across different human-environment systems, this thesis contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex and interdisciplinary nature of adaptation.