ICT 4 Climate Change Adaptation: Systemic and Generative Perspectives & Tools

The predicted manifestations of global climate change are diverse and extensive. Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) offer great potential to enable and enhance climate change adaptation projects, programmes and activities. As yet these roles have received relatively little systematic consideration. In this paper we outline the nature of climate change adaptation contexts and present a set of prototype tools that aim to enable the identification and exploration of opportunities for ICTs to play positive roles across the full spectrum of climate change adaptation contexts. The tools are both generative and systemic—generative in enabling the creative identification of potential adaptation roles for ICTs, of all kinds, and systemic in providing a means of taking into account the complex interactions between the key elements of any climate change adaptation context. Further because of their systemic nature they can be iteratively applied enabling adaptive responses to the inevitable change within any climate change adaptation project. The paper provides an illustration of the generative use of the tools and finally explores key limitations in the initial work leading to suggestion for further development.