Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Our global environment is changing in ways that we are beginning to observe in our lifetimes:

• Climate is warming by as much as a degree centigrade per decade in parts of the Polar North.
• Permafrost is thawing.
• Species ranges are shifting northwards in latitude and upwards in altitude.
• Sea level is rising.
• Sea ice is shrinking.
• Polar ice is thinning.
• Pervasive droughts are beginning to grip parts of the world.
• 50 and 100 year rain storms are happening multiple times in a decade.
• Warming is wreaking havoc on cultures around the world.  Inuit communities are losing their villages and traditional hunting grounds. Bangladeshi farmers are losing their coastal fields to saltwater incursion.  Pacific islanders are poised to lose their atolls. This week, Nature published a story about how the thawing of the Thorthormi Glacier in the Himalayas threatens the nation of Bhutan.

Tim Killeen, head of Geosciences at NSF, once said that if you look at model projections of climate, they all say the same thing up to the year 2030:  Based on the gases we have already emitted, and the inertia in the ocean-atmosphere system, we are committed to climate change at least to this point, and there’s little we can do about it.  This means we have no choice but to start adapting to things like changing seasonality in temperatures and precipitation, food production, sea level rise, and species distributions.  The most recent IPCC synthesis report echoes this.

After 2030, however, models diverge depending on which socioeconomic path we choose.  How fast we de-carbonize the economy will determine the extent to which we mitigate warming and how much further adaptation we will need.

There is vigorous debate about the role of adaptation in a world where mitigation is clearly needed.  Adaptation has long been assailed by the environmental community as giving up.  And now that we need it, old thinking is hard to break.

In a recent article in Yale 360 (Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough), David Orr argues strongly for mitigation over adaptation, although he recognizes that  adaptation strategies in the near term are prudent to meet the changes to which we are already committed.

Today, Bowdoin College’s Environmental Studies program, in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and the McKeen Center for the Common Good, hosted a symposium, “Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainty.” It  included a mix of international and regional scholars and practitioners, social and natural scientists, and issues like biodiversity, water, food, public health, and infrastructure/urban planning.

What were some of the main outcomes this group synthesized about adaptation?

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