Prioritizing Climate Change Adaptation

Published: May 19th, 2010

If you still have doubts about whether climate change is real and poses significant risks to society, those should be put to rest with today’s release of three of the five components of the National Research Council’s comprehensive new report, “America’s Climate Choices.” Congress commissioned the report from the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) two years ago “to study the serious and sweeping issues associated with global climate change.”

The reports, which cover the science of climate change as well as mitigation and adaptation options, amount to a thorough update of climate science. “Together these reports demonstrate that the state of climate science is strong,” NAS president Ralph Cicerone said at a press conference this morning.

Just a quick glance at the reports illustrates that dealing with climate change is indeed a formidable challenge. “America’s Climate Choices” will need to be studied closely. It goes beyond synthesizing the impacts and gaps in the science to address the question of “what do we do about it?”

Most of us are familiar with climate change mitigation — the work we need to do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and avoid dangerous climate change. But many people may be less familiar with climate change adaptation.

The NAS report includes a 243-page chapter on “Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change.” As the preface states: “Adapting to climate change is a relatively new topic for US citizens… there is a groundswell of interest in moving forward quickly to avoid future impacts of climate change.”

Groundswell is no underestimate. Adaptation is emerging as a national priority so quickly that many natural resource managers are first hearing about it at the same time that government mandates are requiring them to justify how they are accomplishing it. Needless to say, there are a lot of gaps in knowledge about what adaptation is, how to accomplish it, and particularly what is effective.

The NAS adaptation chapter will be a big help in inspiring more action on this front, and sets the record straight that we can’t delay action or treat adaptation as a secondary activity anymore.

“Adaption to climate change requires attention now because impacts are already being felt across the United States and further impacts are unavoidable, regardless of how immediately and stringently greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are limited,” the report states.

This is an unfortunate truth. Just focusing on mitigation was a luxury that we lost during the last decade as the US and other nations failed to implement a successful framework to reduce GHG emissions.

But there is a positive way to think about adaptation, which the report illuminates. That is that there are many co-benefits to engaging in adaptation activities. The report wisely points out “that our societies are not even very well-adapted to the existing climate.” We often manage resources very poorly for the climatic variability we experience in today’s climate (think Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the levees, the recent flooding in Nashville, TN, or the water crises brought on by the 2005-2007 drought in the Southeast), so adapting to tomorrow’s climate is really a wake up call to get prepared.

Adaptation promotes proactive and honest appraisals of the vulnerability of our critical resources to a greater-range of climate variability, beyond just recent historical experience, and using the best available information that we have about the future. Such an appraisal should result in action to diminish risk and economic losses. Because it is quite clear that when agencies are stuck cleaning up after disasters, they spend far more money than they would if they paid upfront to employ actions that decreased vulnerability (again think of Katrina, or even the current Gulf oil spill).

Managing risk and vulnerability is the real issue in thinking about climate change – all too often the costs are emphasized in a skewed fashion. “We can’t afford to make changes to X because its costs a lot of money now,” is a common refrain from those who oppose adaptation or mitigation policies. But when you think about it as avoiding future disasters and those associated costs, we might see that we’d prefer to spend the money now from a risk management perspective.

This emphasis on the co-benefits of adaptation is crucial, and fortunately the NAS report drives it home. Here is how the panel puts it.

“Adaptation activities can produce many benefits that support other social objectives, such as sustainable development, public health, economic competitiveness, national security, and international cooperation. Risk management for climate change impacts often helps to address other stresses on human and natural systems as well, and attention to climate change adaptation aims and strategies can be a catalyst for increased attention to relatively long-term sustainability objectives and choices.”

Adaptation will not only require actions by natural resource managers and government agencies at all levels, but also new research priorities in the scientific community, and even actions by individuals as well.

“What we need is not a federal response, but a national response,” said Thomas Wilbanks, a fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who chaired the adaptation chapter. “The main challenge is to bring about a national paradigm shift where we all try to become more adaptable.”