• Climate change, adaptation and international development (more...)
• Past responses to rapid and severe climate change (more...)
• Long-term perspectives on adaptation to climate change (more...)
• Climatic and cultural change in the prehistoric Sahara (more...)
• Cultural contexts and responses to climate change (more...)
• Climate change risk and vulnerability assessment (more...)
• Climate change and Africa (more...)

RESEARCH AREAS

Climate change, adaptation and international development

Climate change poses a challenge to international development, which historically has been pursued under the assumption that climatic and environmental conditions will remain more-or-less constant on timescales longer than those associated with historically familiar seasonal variations and interannual variability. Current approaches to adaptation are based on identifying "additional" measures and investments that can "climate-proof" development, in order to ensure that development can continue broadly along business as usual lines. There is little discussion in governments and international development agencies of whether current economic and development models are viable in the face of climate change and its regional manifestations. This work seeks to examine the viability of current development models under climate change, particularly in marginal and variable environments, and to explore alternative development models. Drawing on case studies (e.g. the 20th century African Sahel), this research asks whether current models based on growth and the maximisation of economic productivity are sustainable in the face of climate change, or whether such models need to be tempered by other approaches that emphasise resilience through risk spreading and redundancy. 

Key publications

• Brooks, N., Brown, K. and Grist, N. 2009. Development Futures in the Context of Climate Change: challenging the present and learning from the past. Development Policy Review 27: 741-765 (download). 

Past responses to rapid and severe climate change

The existing evidence base for adaptation studies consists mostly of examples of responses to incremental changes in existing climate-related risks, and case studies of how people address existing climatic variability. Studies of human responses to large changes in climate and climate-sensitive natural systems are extremely rare. This work seeks to extend the adaptation evidence base by examining how human populations responded and adapted to severe and in some cases rapid climate change during the last period of systematic global climatic reorganisation, which occurred between about 6000 and 5000 years before present (BP). During this period a regular El Niño was established, many middle and high latitude regions experienced cooling, and the northern hemisphere subtropics experienced widespread desiccation, with desertification transforming landscapes across the present day Afro-Asiatic arid belt and elsewhere. This was also a period of profound social and cultural change, which saw the emergence of the earliest cities and states in regions experiencing profound environmental deterioration and resource scarcity. This work seeks to examine the links between climatic and cultural change in the 6th millennium BP, and the Middle Holocene in general, through integrated assessment of palaeoenvironmetnal and archaeological data. A key objective is to identify social and cultural responses to climatically-driven resource scarcity that are robust in space and time and to assess whether such responses might be repeated in the 21st century and beyond. This work formed the basis for a widely cited paper, and a widely publicised public lecture at the British Association Science Festival, in 2006.

Key publications

• Brooks, N. 2010. Human responses to climatically-driven landscape change and resource scarcity: Learning from the past and planning for the future. In I. P. Martini and W. Chesworth (eds.) Landscapes and Societies, in press
• Brooks, N. 2006. Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity. Quaternary International 151, 29-49 (download).

Long-term perspectives on adaptation 

Emerging approaches to adaptation focus overhelmingly on addressing incremental changes in risks resulting from extreme events associated with historically familiar climatic variability, for example more frequent and/or severe floods, drought and storms. Considerations of how societies might adapt to more fundamental changes in climatic and environmental conditions and associated changes in resource availability are almost absent from the adaptation debate. Furthermore, implicit in current adaptation discourses and approaches are a number of assumptions that have not been critically examined. This research critically examines current assumptions about the nature of adaptation in the light of evidence from case studies of adaptation to climate change in the recent and distant past, focusing on episodes of rapid and severe climate change and drawing on the work of the other research themes described here.

Key publications

• Brooks, N. 2010. Human responses to climatically-driven landscape change and resource scarcity: Learning from the past and planning for the future. In I. P. Martini and W. Chesworth (eds.) Landscapes and Societies, in press
• Brooks, N. 2006. Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity. Quaternary International 151, 29-49 (download).

Climatic and cultural change in the prehistoric Sahara

The Sahara provides us with one of the most dramatic examples of climatically-driven environmental change, during which productive landscapes of savannah, scrub, lakes and rivers were transformed into largely hyper-arid desert over timescales of centuries in the 6th millennium before present (with the precise timing of this desiccation varying with location). The work of the Western Sahara Project seeks to develop chronologies of climatic, environmental and cultural change in the northwestern Sahara, and to identify how prehistoric human populations responded to severe climate change in a part of northern Africa that has been neglected in previous palaeoenvironmental and archaeological studies. 

Key publications

• Brooks, N., Clarke, J., Garfi, S. and Pirie, A. 2009. The archaeology of Western Sahara: results of environmental and archaeological reconnaissance. Antiquity 83: 1-17 (request pdf). 
• Brooks, N., Clarke, J., Crisp, J., Crivellaro, F., Jousse, H., Markiewicz, E., Nichol, M., Raffin, M., Robinson, R., Wasse, A. and Winton, V. 2006. Funerary sites in the "Free Zone": Report on the second and third seasons of fieldwork of the Western Sahara Project. Sahara 17, 73-94 (download).
• Brooks, N. 2005. Cultural heritage and conflict: The threatened archaeology of Western Sahara. The Journal of North African Studies 304, 413-439 (download). 
• Brooks, N., Di Lernia, S., Drake, N., Raffin, M. and Savage, T. 2003. The geoarchaeology of Western Sahara: Preliminary results of the first Anglo-Italian expedition in the “free zone”. Sahara 14: 63-80.

Cultural contexts and responses to climate change

A wide range of factors determines whether, and to what extent, individuals and societies at large are willing to take meaningful action to mitigate and/or adapt to potentially detrimental changes in the physical environments in which they are embedded. This research, a collaboration with Thom Heyd at the University of Victoria, examines how different perceptions of the relationship between "society" and "nature" can mediate such actions and result in different outcomes. Addressing the philosophical and ideological roots of these perceptions in different cultural contexts, this work examines the role of culture in shaping discourses surrounding, attitudes towards, and action on climate change. 

Key publications

• Heyd, T. and Brooks, N. Exploring cultural dimensions to climate change. In Adger et al. (eds.) Cambridge University Press (in press).
• Brooks, N. 2003. Climate change, growth and sustainability: the ideological context. Tyndall Centre Briefing Note No. 8 (download).

Climate change risk and vulnerability assessment

This work seeks to develop methodologies for assessing countries' vulnerabilities to a range of climate change hazards, and of characterising climate change risks by combining considerations of underlying vulnerability with assessments of overall country-level exposure to different climate change hazards. Building on earlier work on national-level indicators of risk and vulnerability carried out at the Tyndall Centre, indicator-based methodologies for assessing risk and vulnerability have been developed to assist development agencies in identifying priority countries for adaptation assistance, for example for the World bank administered Pilot Programme on Climate Resilience (PPCR). Related work has sought to develop methodologies and frameworks for evaluating climate change adaptation. 

Key publications

• Frankel-Reed, J. Brooks, N., Kurukulasuriya, P. and Lim, B. 2009. A Framework for Evaluating Adaptation to Climate Change. In R. Van Den Berg and O N. Feinstein (eds.) Evaluating Climate Change and Development. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, pp. 285-298.
• Brooks, N., Adger, W. N. and Kelly, M. 2005. The determinants of vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level and the implications for adaptation. In Adger, W. N., Arnell, N. and Tompkins, E. L. (Eds.) Adaptation to Climate Change: Perspectives Across Scales. Global Environmental Change Part A 15, 151-162 (download).
• Adger W. N ., Brooks, N., Kelly, M., Bentham, S. and Eriksen, S. 2004. New indicators of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, Tyndall Centre Technical Report 7 (download).
• Brooks, N. 2003. Vulnerability, risk and adaptation: A conceptual framework. Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 38 (download).

Climate change and Africa

My research has maintained a strong focus on Africa, and northern Africa in particular. My PhD thesis (Brooks, 2000), conducted at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, under the supervision of Professor Mike Hulme, examined the links between atmospheric dust and drought in the Sahel. Since completing my PhD in 1999, I have continued to work on issues related to African climate variability and change and its impacts on human societies, for example examining the role of pastoralism in northern Africa in enablng societies to cope with variable and marginal climatic conditions over long timescales. I was a contrinuting author to the chapter on Africa in Working Group II of the IPPC's Fourth Assessment Report, and am regularly asked to speak on climate change and Africa at international meetings, and to deliver presentations on this topic to NGOs. 

Key publications

• Contributing author to: Boko, M., I. Niang, A. Nyong, C. Vogel, A. Githeko, M. Medany, B. Osman-Elasha, R. Tabo and P. Yanda, 2007: Africa. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 433-467 (download; link)
• Brooks, N. 2006. Climate Change, Drought and Pastoralism in the Sahel, Discussion Note for World Initiative on Sustainable Pastoralism, WISP/IUCN (download).
• Brooks, N., Di Lernia, S., Drake, N. Chiapello, I., Legrand, M., Moulin, C. and Prospero, J. 2005. The environment-society nexus in the Sahara from prehistoric times to the present day. The Journal of North African Studies 304, 253-292 (download).
• Brooks, N. 2004. Drought in the African Sahel: long-term perspectives and future prospects. Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 61 (download).
• Legrand, M., Pancrati, O, Plana-Fattori, A., Brooks, N., Shipman, L., Lavenu, F. and Manga, A. O. 2001. Dust emission and transport over Africa and the Middle East for the period 1983-2000. IRS 2000: Current Problems in Atmospheric Radiation: Proceedings of the International Radiation Symposium, Saint-Petersburg State University, July 24-29. A. Deepak Publishers.
• Brooks, N. and Legrand, M. 2000. Dust variability over northern Africa and rainfall in the Sahel. In S. McLaren and D. Kniveton (Eds.) Linking Climate Change to Land Surface Change. Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1-25 (download).
• Brooks, N. 2000. Dust-climate interactions in the Sahel-Sahara zone of northern Africa, with particular reference to late twentieth century Sahelian drought . PhD Thesis, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich (link).

Page updated 07 December 2009

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