The problem with adaptation

by | Oct 9, 2008


Climate change policy is bedevilled by two ugly terms: mitigation and adaptation.

(For those who have managed to avoid this jargon, forget the dictionary definitions. The first is used to mean any response that aims to cut carbon; the second, any response that aims to help people cope with a changing climate).

But there’s a big problem with adaptation, once it’s practiced in the real world.

The UK government (through UKCIP) provides an ‘adaptation wizard‘ that is designed to “help determine your vulnerability to climate change, identify your key climate risks, and enable you to develop a climate change adaptation strategy.”

One of its guiding principles is to “identify key climate risks and opportunities and focus on actions to manage these.” Decision makers are enjoined to consider the potential impact of a changing climate on all the major decisions they make.

But this is where it gets difficult. If you’re making a major and long-term investment today, you may have exposure to rising sea levels and temperatures, or growing numbers of extreme weather events.

But none of these are likely to be your greatest source of climate-related vulnerability.

By far your greatest risk will be your exposure to the vagaries of climate policy. The UK is currently committed to a 60% emissions reduction by 2050; 26% by 2020 (all against a 1990 baseline). It seems likely that more stringent targets will have to be taken on (80% by 2050).

This, of course, means that we are in for a complete social and economic revolution – massive changes in the way we live, work and use energy. But no-one knows how this will happen, or how quickly.

So it makes no sense at all to pretend that adaptation is solely, or even mostly, about responding to the vagaries of future weather conditions. But that’s what we do when we shove adaptation and mitigation into different silos.

Resilience, as I argued in a talk at RUSI yesterday (to be published here in the next 24 hours), is about the ability to ‘reorganise while undergoing change.’ If we don’t have shared awareness of the nature of the changes to come, then the chances that we’ll reorganise in the right way must, surely, be minimal.

Author

  • David Steven

    David Steven is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation and at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.

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