Mitigation or adaptation: is there a right way to tackle climate change?
Author: Ben Griffiths | Vice President of Operations
Climate change is the most monumental issue that humanity has ever had to face. Its effects are pervasive and will require individual, organisational, and international action in order to both adapt to its effects and prevent future harm. We have already warmed the planet by approximately 1 degree celsius since the industrial revolution, and this is having observable impacts on the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
So what does this actually look like?
“2.4 billion people worldwide may face intense water scarcity by 2025”
People are experiencing the impacts of this right now in a plethora of different ways. Kiribati, an island nation in the pacific, is sinking, floods are affecting millions of children in South Asia, extreme fires as seen in Australia, California, Siberia, and the Amazon are becoming routine, and species are facing extinction at an unprecedented rate. All of these situations require climate adaptation in order to minimise the carnage. There is also a spectrum of future outcomes that are predicated on human action, or lack thereof, and it is crucial to minimise future warming to avoid certain outcomes. For example, we are currently on track to substantially increase global temperatures (see figure 1) and we need to take dramatic action to prevent immensely destabilising consequences. For example, the estimated financial consequences of 3.7 degrees of warming is $551 trillion USD, which is particularly harrowing given the estimated current value of the world economy is $360 trillion USD. Moreover, up to 2.4 billion people worldwide may face intense water scarcity by 2025, 200 million people may become permanent climate refugees by 2050, and desertification will proliferate global conflict due to crop failure. This immense suffering of all sentient beings can be dramatically reduced through combined effort. You can contribute to this “combined effort” in so many different ways, ranging from your household and local community contributions, all the way to broad inter-governmental coordination. I encourage you to read through my previous piece or Nina Lo’s sustainable fashion piece for a number of ways you can personally get involved.
Figure 1:
This article will focus primarily on the relationship between climate change adaptation and mitigation and whether there are any competing dynamics between them. These concepts are integral to understanding how we can approach climate change and what needs to be done to deal with current and future threats to sentient wellbeing.
On one hand, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate change adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects”.
Examples of adaptation include: sea walls, wearing protective masks, adopting global best practice, constructing support structures for those affected, insurance, emergency warning and evacuation systems, considering climate adaptation when voting, lowering social inequities, migrating from vulnerable areas, and geo-engineering.
On the other hand, the UN environmental program defines climate mitigation as “efforts to reduce or prevent emission of greenhouse gases.”
Mitigation simply refers to any activity that reduces emissions. This can include renewable energy investment, low carbon lifestyles, enforceable multilateral treaties, considering climate mitigation when voting, carbon taxation or emissions trading, and reforestation.
It is commonly believed that these efforts are zero-sum, and that expending resources on one necessarily leads to neglecting the other. The remainder of this piece will examine the interrelated dynamics of adaptation and mitigation while exploring the potential conflicts that these present.
Since the industrial revolution, civilisation has relied largely on electricity created through the burning of fossil fuels, responsible for the emission of extremely high concentrations of CO2.
Global vs Local
One dimension to consider is the geographical element of adaptation and mitigation. Generally speaking, adaptation is isolated to national or local efforts (sea walls, disaster response infrastructure etc) that remain within borders. Conversely, mitigation requires a global response in order to be effective.
Mitigation efforts are necessarily global because emissions have an effect that goes far beyond the emitter, and contributes to a problem that has ramifications throughout the world, whereas adapting to those ramifications is often a local/national effort.
The global nature of mitigation can also lead to a free-rider problem, where the benefits of decreased warming are accrued regardless of one’s own efforts, resulting in inaction. This is the opposite with adaptation where (notwithstanding charity and foreign aid) countries and communities will need to commit resources themselves to get results and they will benefit directly and exclusively from them.
“mitigation requires a global response in order to be effective”
Moreover, it appears self-evident that mobilising resources for adaptation would be easier given the existing infrastructure within nations and the monumental level of coordination global collaboration would require.
In-group bias
As a consequence of its perception as a local problem, individuals may be more receptive to adaptation. This is due to the proximity-bias that results in us seeing the effects and needs of our own community much more deeply than those in other communities. Therefore, it may be more straightforward to convince people (both politically and on a community level) to commit resources towards the visible betterment of their own community/nation as opposed to the often abstract global commitment that is mitigation.
Quite frankly, genuine cosmopolitanism is exceedingly rare and people tend to place much more value on those who they see as part of their in-group or community. Taking on a perceived global problem like mitigation will likely require going beyond this bias and adopting a broader perspective that includes all people and ecosystems.
Time
Another way in which adaptation and mitigation are connected is through time. Present adaptation requirements are a function of previous mitigation efforts and future adaptation requirements are the result of present mitigation efforts.
It is important to consider this disparity in temporal effects between adaptation and mitigation. The benefits of allocating resources towards mitigation has no discernable immediate benefit, which is instead accrued several years into the future, often not by the same people who made the initial sacrifice. The same is not true of adaptation, where the benefits of adapting to, for example, an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, will be immediately useful in handling existing threats in addition to future ones.
Consequences for inequality
Such biases towards adaptation are also problematic because adaptation needs are not equally distributed, nor are emissions equally emitted by nations. Often it is the case that the greatest per-capita emitters have been and will be the least affected by future emissions, and the lowest per-capita emitters are currently and will be the most affected. This is amplified by the fact that the lowest per-capita emitters are often lower income countries without sufficient infrastructure to meet their adaptation needs. For example, the Asia-Pacific region will continue to face disasters of increased intensity and magnitude that is far outstripping their growth. Similarly, desertification will exacerbate food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where millions already suffer from it.
“the lowest per-capita emitters are currently and will be the most affected”
This reality that the world’s most vulnerable people contribute the least and suffer the most is the core fact that drives climate justice. This is a framework that sees climate change as an ethical and justice issue, rather than a purely physical phenomenon. Figure 2 is an example of the facts driving climate justice, showing a distorted world map contrasting per-country poverty rates on the top with per-country carbon emissions on the bottom.
Figure 2: Per-country poverty rates (top graphic) vs per-country carbon emissions (bottom graphic)
In light of this climate justice issue, it is necessary to re-evaluate climate adaptation as a concern that isn’t merely local, but international so that we don’t perpetuate and amplify existing inequities. It is of paramount importance that resources, information, and people are shared so that we can collectively develop joint systems and infrastructure to create a best-practice for adaptation that employs the valuable contributions of the global community while supporting those who are most in need of assistance.
What does this mean?
This all means that adaptation can be more easily promoted conceptually to people, as it doesn’t necessarily require any form of altruistic self-sacrifice for future generations, nor does it necessarily involve significant collective action in the same way that mitigation does.
This is deeply problematic because mitigation is absolutely essential. If we continue to increase emissions the consequence for sentient wellbeing would be horrifying and would make meaningful adaptation an impossibility.
“Any serious attempt at combating climate change needs to incorporate both adaptation and mitigation”
Any serious attempt at combating climate change needs to incorporate both adaptation and mitigation efforts in a synchronous way that has not yet been achieved. The most straightforward way to achieve this would be to find causes that both mitigate emissions and improve adaptability.
Here are a handful of examples:
Reforestation: Trees help to take carbon out of the atmosphere while also improving community resilience and holding back desertification. A promising example of this is the African Union’s Great Green Wall Initiative to combat desertification.
Removing sources of emissions from population centres: This would decrease overall emissions while improving air quality and decreasing pressure on hospitals which will be required for good adaptation. Air pollution is estimated to kill 7 million people per year and this number can be dramatically reduced or increased depending on human action.
Installing solar panels in businesses and residential buildings: This would decrease reliance on fossil fuels while also creating a decentralised energy system that isn’t vulnerable to disasters that wipe out centralised grids.
Technology investment: Creating and improving carbon-neutral and carbon-negative technologies helps make both adaptation and mitigation more cost effective and easier to accomplish.
Maintaining and strengthening multilateral institutions and collaboration: This could build global adaptive resilience and creates a framework through which to reduce global emissions.
Looking forward
Though these initiatives have merit on their own, much greater efforts will be required on an international level to achieve any substantial change. We also need to use a framework that incorporates adaptation and mitigation in order to tackle climate change in a holistic way while creating much needed momentum while we still have time. However, it is a great way to motivate those who are solely focussed on adaptation to incidentally contribute to mitigation. It also disrupts the notion that the two concepts are necessarily in conflict and zero-sum by creating positive-sum solutions that allow us to begin tackling mitigation and adaptation simultaneously.