Is An Ounce of Mitigation Worth a Pound of Adaptation?
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday to ease a drought today
Should we focus entirely on avoiding climate change, or should we reserve some of our efforts on preparing for whatever level of change will nevertheless occur?
In 2007, John Holdren, who later became a climate advisor to president Obama, said:
We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.
The idea here is that the future will entail some mixture of the following three elements:
Mitigation: anything that reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere – i.e. basically everything I talk about in this blog.
Adaptation: to the extent that we fail to mitigate, we can take actions to cope with the resultant climate change. Building seawalls to hold back rising oceans, planting less-thirsty crops in areas where droughts are becoming more common, and so forth.
Suffering: what we get, to the extent that we fail to mitigate or adapt.
In posts like John Doerr Has a Plan and Optimizing for 2050, I’ve talked a lot about tradeoffs: how much do we invest in electric cars vs. trains? Is it more effective to build solar panels today, or research advanced geothermal for tomorrow? Well, mitigation vs. adaptation is another tradeoff.
It’s Too Late to Purely Mitigate
The IPCC recently released a report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. It weighs in at 3500 pages, which I have not read; but there is a 37 page summary.
It is, of course, sobering. One theme is that we really can’t think of climate change as something that will happen in the future; it’s arrived:
Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people… The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt.
This being the IPCC, even the summary goes into overwhelming detail, describing harms ranging from wildfires and “drought related tree mortality” to coral bleaching; all rolling into “adverse socioeconomic consequences”. Oh, and all of this is worse than previously expected: “The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments.” As the New York Times summarizes:
Few nations are escaping unscathed. Blistering heat waves made worse by global warming have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, ferocious floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Australia and Siberia.
In other words, even if we could somehow slam on the brakes and halt all greenhouse emissions today – which of course is not remotely feasible – it is too late to address climate change through mitigation alone. We’ll have to adapt; or, per John Holdren, suffer.
We Can Only Adapt So Much
Mitigation alone can’t shield us from the effects of climate change, but neither can adaptation. Without mitigation, the climate will eventually change beyond our ability to adapt. No feasible seawall will protect our coasts, no amount of agricultural innovation will sustain third-world farmers.
Perhaps more to the point, even if we could adapt to unmitigated climate change, it’s a stupid idea. In the long run, mitigation is vastly more cost effective – thanks to rapid innovation, it will in many cases be profitable – to say nothing of the collateral benefits for the natural environment.
An excessive focus on adaptation at the expense of mitigation would also lead us down dead ends. From a recent article in the Economist (sorry, paywalled):
[The new IPCC report] warns of risks from “maladaptation”, in which efforts to deal with the impacts of climate change do more harm than good. One example would be building a sea wall around a city. Doing so protects the residents from rising sea levels and storm surges in the short term. But it can change the pattern of currents by the coast, creating worse erosion elsewhere.
And:
In the floodplain around the Jamuna river in Bangladesh there is evidence that the presence of levees attracts more people to live there, increasing the number of deaths that would result were a levee to break. Starting an irrigation system in an area where rain can no longer be relied on to grow crops could lead to overconsumption of river water, leaving people downstream with less. “In choosing the right solutions, we need to be thinking about more than just one climate hazard and also about the range of side-effects of the interventions we undertake,” says Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and one of the report’s authors.
Finally, a reminder that even if we can adapt, not all species can:
Coral reefs, rainforests, coastal wetlands and polar and mountainous ecosystems are all butting up against “hard limits”. For example, at 1.5°C of warming the report expects the number of terrestrial and freshwater species at very high risk of extinction may be as great as 14%.
All of this is to say that we had better focus on mitigation first and foremost. Adaptation cannot make the problem go away.
We Can Do Both
We don’t need to choose between mitigation and adaptation. The economy is big, we can do a lot of things at once. New developments, such as the coming wave of cheap solar power, will further expand our productive capacity. I’m becoming a fan of the “abundance agenda”, which basically says that we force ourselves into too many either/or decisions when, with a focus on innovation, we can have both. I highly recommend this article by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic for an introduction.
Framing mitigation and adaptation as alternatives will limit our ambitions, causing us to budget our way down rather than innovating our way up. And we’ll need both. Mitigation can’t help us today, and adaptation can’t keep up with an unmitigated future.
Mitigation Needs Us More
Despite everything I just said, I plan to stay 100% focused on mitigation.
Last week, I talked about how society’s tendency is to under-prioritize climate change, because it has diffuse impact, delayed consequences, tipping points, and downstream effects. Those arguments apply to mitigation much more than adaptation. Adaptation’s benefits are local, not diffuse, and address comparatively near-term impacts – often impacts that are already occurring today. The “tipping point” and “downstream effects” arguments are weaker with regard to adaptation, as well. This doesn’t mean adaptation is unimportant. But it’s less likely to be neglected. Society needs to address adaptation. I just don’t think it needs as much help to figure that out.
To be clear, adaptation is not yet happening quickly enough – it is neglected. But mitigation is even more not happening quickly enough. Adaptation is a greater challenge in poorer countries, but lack of mitigation will affect those countries more. In general, every argument in favor of adaptation seems to apply even more strongly to mitigation. So: we need both, and I would never try to convince someone to stop working on adaptation. But I’m sticking to mitigation.