The interfaces of public and private adaptation: Lessons from flooding in the Deerfield River Watershed

Successful adaptation to climate risks will depend on the outcomes of many coordinated and uncoordinated actions. Key will be ensuring public and private adaptations undertaken at a variety of scales do not undermine one another. To improve understandings of how adaptive responses accumulate, we investigate interactions between public and private efforts to mitigate flood hazards in the Deerfield River Watershed, located in Western Massachusetts, USA. Through interviews, we uncover the manner in which private adaptations, undertaken by landowners seeking to protect their land from flood impacts, are both determined in response to and have an effect on public adaptations seeking to address flood impacts across the watershed. Landowners respond to public adaptations based on their perceptions of the appropriateness of adaptive pathways including how they view the effectiveness of adaptive action and how the actions fit with the social contract. As a result, the interface between public and private adaptations takes various forms: commutable, attenuating, synergistic, or countervailing. Our findings underscore how, in areas with high geo-physical connectivity and where responsibility is dispersed across private and public entities, anticipating and responding to multiple interfaces between public and private adaptations is needed for public adaptations to achieve the best cumulative outcomes.