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February
7, 2007 While many consider
it taboo,
adaptation to global climate change needs to be recognized as just as
important
as "mitigation," or cutting back, of greenhouse gases humans pump
into Earth's atmosphere. The science policy experts, writing in the
Feb. 8,
2007 issue of Nature, say adapting
to
the changing climate by building resilient societies and fostering
sustainable
development would go further in securing a future for humans on a
warming
planet than just cutting gas emissions. "New ways of
thinking about,
talking about and acting on climate change are necessary if a changing
society
is to adapt to a changing climate," the researchers state in "Lifting
the Taboo on Adaptation." The policy experts
include Daniel
Sarewitz, director of Arizona State University's Consortium for
Science, Policy
& Outcomes; Roger Pielke Jr., University of Colorado, Boulder;
Gwyn Prins,
London School of Economics, London, England, and Columbia University,
New York;
and Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute at Oxford University,
Oxford,
England. Sarewitz and his
colleagues argue
that the time to elevate adaptation to the same level of attention and
effort
as the more popular mitigation of greenhouse gases is now, and that the
future
of the planet demands realistic actions to help the survival of humans. "The obsession with
researching and reducing the human effects on climate has obscured the
more
important problems of how to build more resilient and sustainable
societies,
especially in poor regions and countries," Sarewitz said. "Adaptation has been
portrayed as a sort of selling out because it accepts that the future
will be
different from the present," Sarewitz added. "Our point is the future
will be different from the present no matter what, so to not adapt is
to
consign millions to death and disruption." Adaptation is the
process by
which societies prepare for and minimize the negative effects of a
variety of
future environmental stresses on society, Sarewitz said. Mitigation is
the
effort to slow and reduce the negative impacts of climate change by
slowing the
accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "The key difference
is that
adaptation is the process by which societies make themselves better
able to
cope with an uncertain future, whereas mitigation is an effort to
control just
one aspect of that future by controlling the behavior of the climate,"
Sarewitz said. Policy discussions
on climate
change in the 1980s included adaptation as an important option for
society. But
over the past two decades, the idea of adapting to global environmental
changes
has become problematic for those advocating emissions reductions and
was
"treated with the same distaste as the religious right reserves for sex
education in schools – both constitute ethical compromises
that will only
encourage dangerous experimentation with undesired behavior," the
policy
experts state. Over the years,
mitigation was
favored as the global response to climate change, and adaptation seemed
relegated to local responses to the specific changes brought on by
global
warming. Major global efforts to cut emissions were convened in the
United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto
Protocol.
In those efforts, mitigation was talked about in the grandest of levels
and
adaptation as only having a limited impact. As a result,
adaptation was often
looked upon in a negative sense, to be used if the grander plans
failed. All
the while, the effects of global warming were beginning to be felt,
most
notably in poorer countries and regions. "To define
adaptation as the
cost of failed mitigation is to expose millions of poor people in
compromised
ecosystems to the very dangers that climate policy seeks to avoid," the
authors state. "By contrast, defining adaptation in terms of
sustainable
development, would allow a focus both on reducing emissions and on the
vulnerability of populations to climate variability and change, rather
than
tinkering at the margins of both emissions and impacts. "By introducing
sustainable
development into the framework, one is forced to consider the missed
opportunities of an international regime that for the past 15 years or
more has
focused enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic and fiscal
resources on
mitigation, while downplaying adaptation by presenting it in such
narrow terms
so as to be almost meaningless," they add. "Until adaptation is
institutionalized at the level of intensity and investment at least
equal to
the UNFCCC and Kyoto, climate impacts will continue to mount unabated,
regardless of even the most effective cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions."
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