BECOMING DARWINISTS:

Pushing Past the Taboo of Climate Adaptation: Shunned in the past as trumping mitigation, the issue of climate adaptation is now receiving serious attention. With a global climate conference heating up in Durban, South Africa, Kristian Beadle makes sense of the adaptation question (Kristian Beadle, 11/29/11, Miller-McCune)

In October, a group of investors shepherding $20 trillion in assets signed an appeal for clear, long-term policies as incentives for low-carbon economies. Later that month, a study listed the nations and mega-cities most at risk from climate impacts. Then, a report on refugees found that nations must prepare to help millions re-settle in the coming decades.

The link between these headlines is climate adaptation: reconfiguring our world's economies and policies to work under a more extreme climate. While that might seem like an old conversation, it's not; mitigation -- reducing greenhouse gases -- has been the main topic of climate discussion in the past 20 years. But attention is shifting to the once taboo topic of adaptation.

"Nobody talked about it," Richard Klein, a climate specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me during last year's global climate conference in Cancun, Mexico. "People thought that adaptation meant giving up on mitigation efforts. It was politically incorrect. But after the last two decades -- with frequent hurricanes, droughts, floods, record temperatures -- we see that people are already adapting, whether we like it or not.

"The battle to reduce greenhouse gases is worth fighting; even though vested economic interests make mitigation a tough topic. But planned adaptation is now just as necessary."

About time they joined us Creationists in believing that Man adapts to his environment.

Posted by oj at November 29, 2011 6:06 PM
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