Of the 2.6 billion people who live on less than $2 per day, almost 2 billion live in rural areas, in countries whose economies and people are most dependent on natural resources. Efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty in half in such areas are being stymied by the already-evident impacts of climate change. Shown in this figure is the forecasted change in agricultural output potential from the turn of the century to 2080.

On the left-hand side of the continuum, the most vulnerability-oriented adaptation efforts overlap almost completely with traditional development practice, where activities take little or no account of specific impacts associated with climate change, and have many benefits in the absence of climate change.

The prognosis is mixed for meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from 1990 levels by 2015. At the global level, this goal is still within reach: extreme poverty is expected to continue declining to around 12 percent of the global population in 2015. But many countries will not come close to meeting the MDG goal, particularly in Africa.

Placing individual instances of adaptation along this spectrum is at best an inexact science. However, as this figure illustrates, the authors find the bulk of the experience to date focuses on the “messy middle” of building capacity and managing climate risk, where adaptation is neither wholly focused on climate change impacts nor completely oriented toward the underlying drivers of vulnerability. This figure draws on a set of case studies published in the WRI report Weathering the Storm.