Adapting to climate change: gaps and strategies for Central Asia

Adaptation is an urgent and critical way to cope with the impact of climate change. The Paris Agreement has noted that adaptation is a key component of the global response to climate change. Nations with lower incomes and greater vulnerability to climate change have and will continue to suffer from the potential or actual impacts of climate change due to their limited and fragmented adaptation. Here, we consider Central Asia as a case study due to its increasing temperature, increasing rainfall variability, worsening drought, rapid institutional changes after independence, and uneven economic investment in adaptation. This paper identifies five urgent fields (including the theoretical basis, technology and measure, law and regulation, funding, and the political system) and analyzes the gap between ideal and real adaptation, finds the direction for future adaptation, and provides adaptation strategies for similar nations by using CiteSpace, which is based on the Web of Science Core Collection from 1990 to 2019. The detailed strategies present four mainstream development directions: (1) improve the theoretical basis of adaptation and increase investment in research; (2) encourage research and development into targeted approaches of adaptation and acquire technology transfer from developed countries; (3) integrate adaptation into medium- and long-term plans for national sustainable development, widely involving non-government agencies in the process; and (4) obtain financial support from international organizations.