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Despite extreme weather displacing millions and destroying livelihoods, some continue to argue that focusing our efforts on adapting to climate change distracts from the urgent need to mitigate.
We have limited time and resources, they say, which should be devoted to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to conceding that the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is dead.
“But it’s inevitable now that we’re going to need to adapt, and that realisation has come over the past decade or so,” says Dr Susannah Fisher, principal research fellow at University College London. “Regardless of where we are with emissions; potentially driving 2°C of warming or more, we’re going to have impacts across the globe and people are not prepared to cope.”
She has spent 15 years as a researcher and adviser supporting governments, cities, climate funds and communities to adapt to climate change, but says that efforts have so far been “incremental”.
Her latest book, Sink or Swim, highlights the urgent need for “transformational adaptation”, and explores the hard choices ahead concerning how people earn a living, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and how we accommodate the movement of people.
However, she is keen to stress that cutting emissions is still of “primary importance”. “Adaptation is the other side of the coin to mitigation, and it’s really important to emphasise that we still need to mitigate as quickly as possible, which is the best way to prevent further adaptation.”
Climate adaptation will be much more expensive if temperatures rise unabated. The upfront costs for transitioning to low-carbon systems decrease over time with innovation and scaling, while adaptation will have to constantly deal with escalating physical impacts such as floods, heatwaves and sea-level rise.
Unfortunately, when it comes to mitigation, we haven’t made progress quickly enough, Fisher says, and decision makers need to accept that reality. “There was a lot of reluctance initially because of the fear that we need to put all of our efforts into mitigation, but it’s clear, as we’ve seen from the extreme weather events this year, that we can’t avoid adaptation.”
She continues: “However, it’s really important that we don’t start hearing the argument that we can adapt our way out of this, because we can’t. “If we go to these higher degrees of warming, increasingly we’re going to hit hard limits where we won’t be able to adapt in particular places, or grow food and live safely, so we need to mitigate to keep us below those limits.”
The UN has a target for climate finance to be split 50:50 between adaptation and mitigation, although Fisher says this was a political response to the fact that the former was getting such little attention.
“There’s a lot of good economic modelling on how much money you save by doing preventative work on disaster risk reduction, but it hasn’t really shifted the needle yet,” she says. “That’s probably due to the short-term nature of political cycles, but it’s also really hard to calculate the costs. Are we adapting to 2°C or 4°C? There are a lot of assumptions involved.”
Sink or Swim explains how governments and institutions have been tinkering around the edges of current systems when it comes to adaptation, and argues that this will not be enough.
“It has been incremental change so far; trying to help people and places exist as they always have,” Fisher tells me. “For example, a community reliant on a borehole for water, which you could make a little bit deeper so you can still access water in times of drought.
“A transformational adaptation lens would say the small tweaks may not be enough. It might be that smallholder farmers have to move into a different type of livelihood. Even in the UK, it might not be possible to live in some places and continue life as usual. There are big choices ahead about how we transform the systems that we’re living in to allow for climate risks.”
However, the book states that very few of these choices will be made purely by individuals, and that they “sit within political and economic structures and systems of power, interests and influence”. “Responding to climate change is put down to individuals, such as insulating our own homes. The reality of those choices is that they’re shaped by things around us,” Fisher says.
“We might be living in poor housing stock, or our local public services aren’t supported. We need to think more about the systems and infrastructure that support people to manage the extremes, or else we’re putting too much of a burden on individuals, and we will get regressive outcomes in terms of who is able to adapt and who is left facing the consequences.”
There has been heated debate around the level of migration into the UK this year, which is set to increase as climate change intensifies. Indeed, a European Parliament report claims that more than 376 million people have been forcibly displaced by floods, windstorms, earthquakes or droughts since 2008, with a record 32.6 million in 2022 alone.
However, Fisher says: “I would be very cautious about using a fear-laden narrative. Often the media says hundreds of millions of people are coming to the UK because of climate change, and it is securitised as a threat, dismissing the potential contribution migrants can make.
“Unplanned migration is hugely difficult for all host areas, but we can develop more strategic, safe and dignified pathways for people to move. Regardless of migration, the UK will experience transboundary risks, including food insecurity.”
A UN report published in October warned that a “yawning gap in adaptation finance for developing countries is putting lives, livelihoods and entire economies at risk”, with more than $310bn needed per year by 2035 – 12 times as much as current flows.
This year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil had a much greater focus on adaptation than previous conferences. However, Fisher says it’s clear that public finance is not going to be available at the scale needed to plug the gap.
“It’s going to be really hard to bring in other sources of finance, because some parts of adaptation are not attractive for big private sector investment,” she says. “But we’re going to have to see much more leveraging of private inputs and public finance being used in a catalytic way.
“There’s some interesting work being done on taxes and aviation and shipping levies, and I think that could offer some important ways forward. The challenge is that everybody’s got to agree to them in the first place, and that’s where we’re stuck at the moment.”
Another challenge lies in measuring what good adaptation looks like. The
international community is working towards a Global Goal on Adaptation, with 100 indicators agreed in Brazil this year, including climate-resilient water and food supplies in places that need it. The problem is that the needs are so different around the world.
“If you think about rail infrastructure in the UK, some of it will be dangerously close to coastlines, while an uptick in air conditioning without a decarbonised energy system will play against our net-zero goals,” Fisher says. “It’s a very different set of challenges to the extreme heat that Spain and Greece are facing, or the hurricanes in the US.
“How we track it is usually quite locally specific, but the difficulty is we’re talking about a very changing scenario. We don’t know what’s going to happen with socioeconomic trends in 20 or 30 years. We can’t always say what a good outcome looks like, but we can try and build a process that brings in as many people as possible.”
She says that sustainability professionals in local government must think hard about involving members of the public in long-term planning for climate impacts. “We have guidance emerging suggesting that some towns might need to be realigned from a physical-science perspective and a public-sector-budget perspective, and it’s obviously very difficult for the people living there if they have not been involved in those decisions.”
While the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement may look increasingly out of reach, it’s important to remember that Article 7 stresses the need to “significantly strengthen national adaptation efforts, including through support and international cooperation” for this “global challenge faced by all”, which must go hand in hand with mitigation.
“My book is about the challenges, because only through knowing these challenges can we try to do things better, and not throw our hands up in despair,” Fisher says. “We’re facing these hard choices, lots of political questions, but if we put our head in the sand and don’t face up to them until we’re literally facing sea-level rise, it will be too late.”
COP conferences have not always gone to plan over the past three decades, but there are reasons for hope, she adds: “There’s a role for lots of people working more pragmatically and saying, ‘yeah, the system is not perfect, but I need to work within these structures to build a better future the best I can’. The other option is giving up, and that’s certainly not going to work.”
Chris Seekings is the Deputy Editor of ISEP’s Transform magazine, which is published biomonthly for ISEP members. Chris’s role involves writing sustainability-related news, features and interviews, as well as helping to plan and manage the magazine’s other day-to-day activities.
