Be Ready to Reduce Mainstreaming : A Quantitative Study on What Aspects Facilitate Climate Change Adaptation Mainstreaming on a Global Scale

Climate change is one of the most pressing questions of our lifetimes. Most scholars agree that the consequences of climate change are going to affect us, however policy regarding climate change has been focused on the mitigating aspect of climate change instead of climate change adaptation. This thesis aims at understanding what aspects facilitate climate change adaptation mainstreaming and to potentially find patterns of what characteristics the countries who mainstream climate change adaptation have in common. The research question this analysis has the objective of answering is “What country characteristics positively correlate with climate change adaptation mainstreaming?”. The independent variables measured are GDP per capita, vulnerability, institutional and social capacity and commitment to climate change adaptation and if the country is located in Europe. Four hypotheses are formulated to answer the research question and these hypotheses are tested by conducting a logistic regression analysis on a dataset including 3397 policies from 117 countries during the time period of 2008-2012. The results of this analysis are that higher GDP per capita has a very small but statistically significant positive relationship with mainstreaming, whilst greater vulnerability has a strong positive and statistically significant relationship with mainstreaming. Greater institutional and social capacity and commitment to climate change adaptation has a strong, statistically significant, negative relationship with climate change adaptation mainstreaming. The geographical location of a country, whether it was located in Europe or not, had a negative, significant relationship with the dependent variable. Further studies need to be conducted on the topic to confirm these results.