Methodology for Evaluating Climate Change Adaptive Capacities when Using Decentralized Renewable Energies

Extreme climatic events have already happened in different regions of our world affecting the economic resources of poor and even rich countries. As an example we can mention the recent destructive hurricanes, Katrina (2005) in New Orleans and Sandy (2012) in New York, or floods in Pakistan in 2010. Therefore, there is an increasing need for evaluating the adaptive capacities of communities, regions or even whole countries to events caused by climatic changes. In this work we address different methodologies for this purpose and give reasons for adopting the adaptive capacities wheel developed by Gupta et al. [1] as the basic way for this evaluation. We add an additional dimension to those already developed by Gupta for determining the capacity of a community for having basic services (health, communications, safety, etc.) in a situation of crisis caused by climatic changes. A climatic crisis generally affects the conventional energy infra-structure and therefore decentralized renewable energies would reduce vulnerability of the community in question. At the end we discuss the evaluation made under these assumptions for a selected community in Mexico.