USA: Once derided, ways of adapting to climate change are gaining steam
By Andrew Revkin
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Through 30 years of efforts to limit global warming, the dominant goal was cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases, most importantly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Efforts to adapt communities or agriculture to warming and the related rise in seas and other impacts were often seen as a copout.
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But signs are emerging that a significant shift is under way, dividing the climate challenge into two related, but distinct, priorities: working to curb greenhouse gases to limit odds of worst-case outcomes later this century while boosting resilience to current and anticipated climatic and coastal hazards with just as much fervor. There’s action from the top down, and—perhaps more significant in the long run—from the bottom up.
The most prominent signs of the rising profile of adaptation came with the launch in October of a Global Commission on Adaptation and a December commitment of $200 billion in climate finance over five years by the World Bank and partners.
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Another source of concern is accumulating research revealing patterns of extraordinarily extreme weather through the last several thousand years in places now heavily built and populated. Scientists dissecting cores of layered ancient marsh and lake mud and other clues to past climate conditions have revealed spasms of frequent, powerful hurricanes even in past cooler periods around Puerto Rico, extreme hill-scouring rainstorms in Vermont, and century-long megadroughts in Ghana—meaning calamities that might be perceived as “unprecedented” are in fact simply rare, and thus unmeasured, threats.
All of this reinforces the reality that vulnerability reduction is essential with or without global warming, said Richard J.T. Klein, a longtime analyst of climate risk and policy options at the Stockholm Environment Institute.
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