Mitigation and Adaptation
People in the world of climate policy tend to use two terms, which we have used in structuring this website – ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’. Good climate policy, at international, national, local and organisational level, needs to include both.
Mitigation refers to efforts to limit the amount of climate change. The main way to do this is to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases, in order to limit the extent of climate change. This could be also called ‘prevention’ but this might be seen as holding out the hope that we can prevent climate change. This option is no longer open to us – what we get to do now is decide how bad it will be.
The 2015 Paris Agreement saw the world’s nations agree to take action to limit global temperature increases to between 1.5 and 2 degrees C. If we are to have a good chance of doing this, we need to limit the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The precise amount we can emit is subject of some debate among climate scientists, but all agree that if we keep emitting at our present rate we will blow this target quickly. The consensus/compromise that the UN is working on is that we need to halve our emissions by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ by 2050. An increasing number of nations (although not yet Australia) have committed to these goals, but there is still a long way to go before we have policies and action plans that will actually deliver on these promises.
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Mostly, we need to reduce our emissions by switching from fossil fuel to renewable technologies for electricity, transport and industrial processes, and changing our agricultural practices. There also may be some role for carbon capture, to remove some of the CO2 already in the system, but these technologies remain unproven and expensive.
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Adaptation refers to the need to make changes so that we can live with the amount of climate change we have already ensured will take place. We are already facing increased temperatures, rising sea levels, increased coral bleaching and more extreme weather events including droughts, floods and heat waves, and this will get worse as the climate continues to change, even if we achieve the Paris Agreement goal.
Adaptation can involve a whole lot of things – for instance, responding to sea level rises could involve building sea walls to keep out high tides, or moving human habitations to higher ground. Adapting to changed rainfall patters can involve changed agricultural practices or changes in water management such as more dams or bores, or more use of irrigation. Adaptation to more frequent heatwaves can require all sorts of changes, including modifications to buildings to make them better able to be cooled, public health strategies to respond to heat exhaustion, revisions to temperature protocols at sporting events and so on. From the point of view of impacts on non-human species, adaptations will involve species recovery plans and habitat management which factor in the effects of climate change.