Responding to Maladaptation in Israel’s Desalination: Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Second-Order Adaptation

Adaptation is critical to alleviate the adverse impacts of climate change on societies worldwide, yet often entails maladaptive effects that increase climate risk or impinge on broader societal objectives. Although many maladaptive effects are difficult to prevent proactively, research focuses on insufficient preventive measures. Here, we analyze second-order adaptation—responses to adaptation’s maladaptive consequences—by examining the ramifications of seawater desalination, a prevalent adaptation in water-stressed regions. To this end, we embed second-order adaptation within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s risk framework and elicit stakeholders’ assessment of desalination impacts and the potential responses in desalination-dependent Israel. We then examine their evaluation of the institutional effort required to undertake second-order adaptation relative to the effort of implementing desalination, concentrating on the complexity of planning and implementation, the necessary financial investment, and the need to develop new knowledge and capacities. We find that desalination leads to a broad range of maladaptive effects across social, environmental, and economic systems, thereby necessitating a similarly broad range of second-order adaptations. Stakeholders’ assessment indicates that such responses might require a smaller financial investment than desalination, yet necessitate new knowledge and capacities. Their evaluation of the relative complexity showed considerable disagreement. We also identify different perspectives on the need for second-order adaptation and expose different approaches to planning for second-order adaptation, ranging from holistic approaches to viewing second-order and first-order adaptation as distinct and unrelated. The findings underscore the need to incorporate second-order adaptation into policy and planning.