Scientific Precision over Social Adaptation: Science and Policy in California’s Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Guidance, 2010–2018

Climate change science revolves to a large extent around ideas of prediction, which by association also come to centrally inform notions of climate change adaptation and mitigation. This paper studies the relationship between scientific prediction and adaptation policy by examining how it has played out in the case of the state of California’s sea-level rise policy guidance, a document produced to help state agencies and local governments in California take climate change–induced sea-level rise into account in planning decisions. We examine the narrative, nature, and development of the policy guidance, from the original request and 2010 interim version to updates in 2013 and 2018, together with associated scientific reports. Our analysis shows that there is a strong tendency in the guidance to focus on the development of best available scientific projections, which become more elaborate over time, while paying less attention to social dimensions or potential policy responses. Based on this analysis, we argue that an overemphasis on precise but uncertain sea-level predictions at the expense of more rounded views of how societies interact with the natural environment propagates a reductive view of climate change that may obfuscate and depoliticize what will inevitably be contested pathways toward sea-level rise adaptation. We suggest that such depoliticization, contrary to the intentions of the policy guidance, may in fact delay social adaptation to climate change.