We live in a world increasingly dominated by transformative change processes: stories of disasters pervade the daily news and the recent IPCC summary report (2007) highlighted the fundamental threat to society posed by climate change. Adaptation and disaster risk reduction, previously academic topics of interest only to specialist groups, are now common currency in policy debates, the media and public dialogue. Few, if any, people (ourselves included) have a comprehensive understanding of what climate risk reduction or adaptation to the impacts of climate change may actually entail. This report, a preliminary step in a much broader programme, presents some initial insights from methodological investigations and field studies which explore the link between disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. The studies presented illustrate the various roles that approaches targeted toward hazard-specific and underlying systems can play in diverse contexts and in response to multiple hazards.

Research for this report was undertaken in the Nepal Tarai, Eastern Uttar Pradesh, coastal Tamilnadu and coastal Gujarat of India, and the Lai Basin and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan. The programme was financed by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Keywords: Disaster Risk Reduction/Hazard Management; Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation