Societies must adapt to global warming, mitigation alone is not the answer

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Societies must adapt to global warming, mitigation alone is not the answer
mongabay.com
February 7, 2007

Mankind must prepare for global warming by building resilient societies and fostering sustainable development, says a team scientists writing in the current issue of the journal Nature. The researchers say climate change is inevitable and policymakers should be plan adaptation strategies to minimize the negative impacts of future environmental stresses on society.

"New ways of thinking about, talking about and acting on climate change are necessary if a changing society is to adapt to a changing climate," the researchers state in "Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation."

"The obsession with researching and reducing the human effects on climate has obscured the more important problems of how to build more resilient and sustainable societies, especially in poor regions and countries," said Daniel Sarewitz, director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and a co-author of the study. "Adaptation has been portrayed as a sort of selling out because it accepts that the future will be different from the present. Our point is the future will be different from the present no matter what, so to not adapt is to consign millions to death and disruption."

Photo by R. Butler

The scientists say mitigation alone is not a safe strategy for staving off the negative consequences of climate change.

"The key difference is that adaptation is the process by which societies make themselves better able to cope with an uncertain future, whereas mitigation is an effort to control just one aspect of that future by controlling the behavior of the climate," Sarewitz said.

Over the years policymakers and scientists have proposed a number of mitigation schemes including sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and reforesting large areas of land, but the new paper argues these steps are not enough and that sustainable development and adaptation must be integrated into any potential framework on climate change.

"To define adaptation as the cost of failed mitigation is to expose millions of poor people in compromised ecosystems to the very dangers that climate policy seeks to avoid," write the authors. "By contrast, defining adaptation in terms of sustainable development, would allow a focus both on reducing emissions and on the vulnerability of populations to climate variability and change, rather than tinkering at the margins of both emissions and impacts.

"By introducing sustainable development into the framework, one is forced to consider the missed opportunities of an international regime that for the past 15 years or more has focused enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic and fiscal resources on mitigation, while downplaying adaptation by presenting it in such narrow terms so as to be almost meaningless," they add. "Until adaptation is institutionalized at the level of intensity and investment at least equal to the UNFCCC and Kyoto, climate impacts will continue to mount unabated, regardless of even the most effective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions."

This article is based on a news release by Skip Derra from Arizona State University

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