Widening the Aperture: Keeping People’s Options Open in a Changing Climate

This article was adapted from remarks given by Lauren Risi at a New York Climate Week event hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund and CARE.

We tend to talk about climate change as if it’s a single issue—a shock to be managed. But it’s more than that.

Climate change is transforming the context that shaped the systems we rely on. Our economic systems and supply chains, security structures, and food, water, and energy systems were designed to handle a specific range of shocks and stressors. But the world in which we live no longer fits in that range.

Concretely, what climate change does is narrow the aperture of choices available to people making decisions about their lives and futures. And for coastal communities and small island states, that narrowing is more severe, and more immediate, than almost anywhere else.

What investments widen that aperture? Push it back open? It is imperative that people have real options, including the option to stay in places where migration pressures are mounting.

A Process That Builds on Local Perceptions and Preferences

One tool we’ve built at Stimson to help answer that is CORVI: the Climate and Ocean Risk Vulnerability Index. It’s a decision-support tool that collects and analyzes about 100 indicators across ecological, economic, and social risk. It produces a comprehensive city- or island-specific risk profile that decision-makers can act upon.

One of the challenges of climate change is the specificity with which its impacts land in a given place. Decision-makers need data points that are fit for purpose. CORVI provides that level of specificity through a combination of technical workshops, desktop research, and most importantly, expert surveys with a diverse set of local stakeholders. The index has now run in 16 coastal cities and island states, from the Caribbean to the Pacific to Southeast Asia.

Why CORVI  Works

First, CORVI refuses to let risk stay siloed. In fact, it can trace the whole causal chain.

Take its assessment of Aruba, for example. Tourism makes up nearly 70% of Aruba’s economy. It’s built on a sun-sand-sea model that concentrates people and infrastructure right on the coastline, damaging the coral reefs, seagrass beds, and dune systems that are supposed to protect it. Weaker natural defenses mean worse damage to infrastructure when storms hit, striking direct blows to the tourism industry upon which most Aruban households’ livelihoods depend.

That’s not five separate problems. That’s one feedback loop.

Second, the Index is built to see slow-onset change. Most of our indicators use a 10-year trend window. The climate indicators use 15 years. This is a deliberate choice that captures cascading and compounding risk.

Third, CORVI works even where official data doesn’t exist.

Data scarcity is still the binding constraint in most vulnerable places. The Index uses structured expert judgment—via interviews and surveys with diverse locally-based experts—to fill in a rigorous risk picture. This approach identifies where there are opportunities to build on existing resilience, and helps decision-makers avoid the unintended consequences of well-intentioned investments that are not grounded in local knowledge.

Fourth, this heightened and actionable knowledge only matters if it changes a budget line—and if funds exist to implement it. Localities that have used the Index are making its findings part of their planning

Chattogram, Bangladesh folded its CORVI findings directly into its national Delta Plan. Aruba is using the CORVI findings as the foundation of its National Adaptation Plan, including investments in nature-based infrastructure (including reef and dune restoration) that directly reduces storm damage.

Several of our CORVI partners have struggled with how to implement the report recommendations, however. So with support from TaiwanICDF, we are working now to develop a financing roadmap that helps them pick up where the assessment leaves off. We want to connect our local partners with networks and financing mechanisms necessary to use these findings.

Building Climate Resilience Doesn’t Always Look Like a Climate Response

Broadening the aperture of choices doesn’t always look like a climate response.

During work we did as the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) at the Wilson Center to improve predictive capabilities for climate security risks, we looked at existing vulnerabilities in Northern Central America. In Guatemala, 21% of girls aged 15 to 19 were pregnant or already parenting. This was happening in a country where half the population is under 22. Having children at a young age narrows a girl’s own aperture of choice across the board: education, income, and other foundational life decisions. There’s also strong evidence that investment in girls’ education and access to reproductive health services and family planning has an outsized effect not only on individual households, but on a country’s political stability and economic prosperity.

In the case of Guatemala, providing access to education and access to family planning services and sexual and reproductive health services is therefore resilience-building too—even though it might not get filed under “climate finance.”

It’s also important to note that climate change isn’t the only thing narrowing that aperture. The hardening of borders, populist rhetoric, and mis- and disinformation are reshaping the same decision space. In many cases, this is happening faster than the impacts of climate stress itself.

Yet climate change will keep narrowing the aperture. Cutting emissions today remains critically important. But mitigation alone won’t reopen the aperture for the people already living with today’s climate reality. Ensuring that people have options and the power of choice requires meaningful engagement with affected communities, sharper data, smarter financing, and investments that might not wear a climate label.