Adaptation is widely recognized as one of two main response options to reduce the risks from climate change. It involves major well-known strategies such as agricultural outreach, coastal management, disaster risk management, resource management, spatial and urban planning and public health [
55] (p. 268). It refers to the ability of individuals, societies and systems to cope with multi-scalar processes [
56] and to evaluate information on present and future climate change in relation to planned policies, practices and infrastructure [
55] (p. 268). It must be informed not only by insights on bio-physical, geo-morphological and hydrological conditions but also by those on socio-technological conditions and relations. And it needs to reduce exposure and vulnerability while also increasing capacity to resist or recover from the potential adverse impacts of climate extremes and events [
57].
There is a risk of reaching limits to adaptation especially in places that are most exposed to climate change impacts such as sub-Saharan agriculture where development or transformation, rather than merely adjustment, should be a main purpose of adaptation [
30]. Here the question will arise of who gets to decide the direction, depth and distributional outcome of social change. And who gets to define and grasp potential opportunities when climate change responses are embedded in, mediated by and ‘underpinned by diverse values’ varying across contexts and cultures [
58,
59]?
3.1. Where Are the Inequalities: In Space and Time?
In contrast to other environmental debates, the climate change debate has been less focused on the local and on communities and less focused on agency, identity and gender [
60]. But with strong and growing evidence that frequent droughts, intense heat waves and serious flooding will be socially and spatially differentiated [
3,
61] the global effort to mitigate must be combined with practical local policies that address variations in capacities, real experiences and potential initiatives. Importantly, complexity grows drastically when the focus is shifted from the global to the local where climate change impacts encounter major social forces ranging from commodification and marketization to regulation, technological shifts and large-scale interventions in the environment [
62].
There are also temporal inequalities. In sub-Saharan Africa, where climate change already affects natural resources and rural livelihoods due to recurring floods and droughts [
3,
44] access to multi-scalar and systematic knowledge on climate change adaptation and mitigation may help farmers to adapt their livelihoods in the short run while also informing policy on human security and wellbeing. But when short term measures such as asserting well-known strategies or introducing new specific practices, block or postpone necessary long-term change this may result in mal-adaptation rather than adaptation [
63] (p. 741). Ill-advised efforts to protect ‘human security’ and improve ‘wellbeing’ may end up masking not only existing inequality [
64] but also other precarious conditions that amplify the need to adapt [
65].
The increasing number of studies on climate change responses is still disproportionate to the importance of the issue. Despite substantial investments in research, practical progress is slow, partly due to how adaptation is framed and understood [
53]. But also, because adaptation and mitigation, like development, are inseparable from the socio-ecological context and need to be studied there. In doing so, observers must know that responses will be highly influenced by historical conditions
and properties emerging in the cause of action [
66]. Universal recipes are thus not necessarily productive in addressing climate change and donors must ‘refuse to know exactly what should be done or how’ [
67]. Instead, climate change adaptation and mitigation in a specific setting can be prepared through concrete ‘ground work actions’ comprising public awareness raising and the use of appropriate institutional guidelines [
53]. All of this can also be aligned with appropriate development initiatives.
3.2. How Much Social Change Is Needed: Reform or Transformation?
Adaptation is closely associated with climate change vulnerability and how we speak of their entwinement will affect how we act [
68]. IPCC sees climate impacts as a main source of vulnerability and calls for adaptation as adjustment; others locate risks not only in nature but also in society itself as a source of vulnerability and thus call for adaptation as development or reform to reduce vulnerability within prevailing systems; but little research explores the underlying social drivers of vulnerability or the need to understand and implement climate change responses as transformative climate action [
69,
70] or as profound political-economic transformation [
68].
In the global South, ideological and theoretical assumptions about development may influence interpretations of adaptation and vulnerability [
67]. This prompts the question of whether responses should entail adjustments to current activities or imply fundamental change that needs to be negotiated [
57] (p. 3). Using climate change responses to reconstitute conventional growth driven development is not necessarily acceptable, efficient, or fair, particularly not from a post-development perspective focusing on the tension between climate change drivers in the global North and aspirations for social change in the global South [
67]. And as mentioned above, economic growth may not work for large populations that are poor in sub-Saharan Africa [
40,
41]. Instead, responses should go beyond conventional development and thus seek to implement the many unfulfilled promises to reduce inequality and poverty while enhancing sustainability [
17].
3.3. What about Scales: Community Based or Multi-Scalar Adaptation in Small-Scale Farming?
Despite increasing concentration in global food supply chains, it is widely documented that smallholder farms are essential for providing food and nutrients in low-income and middle-income countries where they contribute decisively to the agricultural economy [
71,
72]. It is estimated that out of 570 million smallholder farms worldwide, some 470 million are found in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia [
73] where they provide over 70 per cent of food calories for people [
74]. Although the typical farm size is under two hectares of land and although all such smallholder farms in total account for only roughly twelve per cent of all agricultural land on earth [
73] they have high
local significance [
71]. And in their struggle to make ends meet they grapple with challenges such as shrinking land size [
75] and increasing impacts from climate change and climate variability.
Storms, floods, droughts and other climate events already cause problems in climate dependent livelihoods in livestock-rearing and small-scale farming. In the decades to come, climate change will worsen the situation, especially in southern Africa where projections consistently predict decreasing rainfall, intensified droughts and increasing climate variability [
3,
61,
76,
77]. Agriculture, biodiversity, ecosystems, water resources and human health will be adversely affected [
3] when seasonal shifts, climate events and changing weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable and more intense [
57]. However, since it is hard to decide what is and what is not attributable to climate change in a certain area [
78] it must be understood in relation to land use change and the multiple stressors of everyday farming including food insecurity and ill-health in the context of gender issues and persistent poverty [
18,
79].
Development practitioners and climate change observers oftentimes propose community-based actions and responses on the premise that communities do have the necessary expertise and networks to initiate appropriate activities to avoid further loss or speed up recovery [
56] (p. 2). But a disproportionate focus and pressure on the local at the expense of the national or global scale can be problematic [
80] and so can community-based approaches to climate change focusing on only one single challenge (climate change) rather than on interconnected aspects of vulnerability [
56] (pp. 3–6). Further, the assumption that the ‘community’ is uniform or inclusive may underestimate inequality and diverging interests within it. Nonetheless, there are valuable lessons to be learned from successful initiatives on community-based adaptation [
81].
In the global South where most people who are poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods [
5,
82] climate change will affect the availability, distribution and quality of agricultural land. Such impact may in turn reinforce social differentiation [
3]. In rural areas those who have limited access and rights to resources, while being responsible for food production, will be the most vulnerable to impacts of climate change and climate variability [
83]. Gender informed data indicate that climate change will have disproportionate effects on small-scale farmers, many of whom are women in sub-Saharan agriculture depending for their living on degrading physical resources—land, water, forest products—and who are already under pressure from the multiple stressors of poverty, ill-health and food insecurity [
3,
39,
43]. This is also confirmed in our research on the food, health and gender imperatives in sustainability science [
11].
To sum up this section, many processes determine how climate change impacts are (and will be) experienced and acted upon by authorities, communities and individuals and also how responses will be initiated, managed and governed. In areas where people who are poor depend on agriculture for their living the key to poverty alleviation is to have access to income-generating resources, whereas the key to adaptation and mitigation is the ability to respond in mind and deed to changing (climatic) conditions [
82]. Farmers who depend on a degrading natural environment will have to adapt and adjust agricultural practices to recurring droughts, flood and other calamities [
3]. But adaptation and poverty alleviation are embedded in social relations and decision-making power [
84] and the ability to adapt in terms of avoiding, controlling, or coping with climate change impacts on resources is deeply differentiated, especially where infrastructure is deficient [
85]. Governments, local authorities and other relevant agencies must therefore enable transitions to much more sustainable livelihood activities, practices and strategies [
86] including those of agroecology [
87]. Below, I will go to the core of the argument and show what lessons we can learn from development, especially on gender, as a major social process closely associated with climate change responses. To conclude the discussion so far, it should be obvious by now, that ‘new’ sustainability challenges, such as climate change and land-use change, are emerging in the context of ‘old’ and persistent social problems such as poverty, inequality, ill-health and food-insecurity [
22,
88]. It is crucial to bear that dynamic in mind when we examine and evaluate conditions for social change.