Our Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience (SAFER) has caused controversy ...
By Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read
… by suggesting adaptation should be a priority in national policy.
We contend that ramping up adaptation activity is the best way to actually achieve decarbonisation in the medium term. In fact, we argue that strategic adaptation to our deteriorating climate must logically include decarbonisation.
Some people, notably Jon Fuller, have had a hard time hearing us on these last two points, and think really we’re giving up on decarbonisation.
Others, notably University of California Professor Adam Aron, are concerned that our “refocusing” on adaptation won’t yield the widening and deepening of concern for decarbonisation that we think it will.
This blog briefly discusses the tensions inherent in the idea of “prioritising adaptation” and early lessons learned about communicating for adaptation. (Prof. Aron’s opinions will be responded to in depth in Resilience, and at our forthcoming national report-launch (online) on the 29th of July.)
The word prioritisation is hard to avoid, but very difficult to use well because adaptation and decarbonisation have often been (wrongly) framed as strict competitors.
Because of this perspective, simply using ‘priority’ in connection with ‘adaptation’ can invite a ‘zero-sum frame’.
Within this frame priority that is added to adaptation is immediately assumed to be subtracted from decarbonisation.
This frame implies that adaptation can substitute for decarbonisation, which is why some fossil fuel companies and climate delayers like Richard Tice promote it.
We said two things repeatedly in the report to try to prevent this kind of misinterpretation, but we’re happy to say them again. First, we contend that adaptation does not truly fit in this restrictive zero-sum frame and this needs to be widely known. Instead, more adaptation today could help drive more resources and attention overall to the entire climate crisis tomorrow. Second, adaptation should be a national priority among all goals, generally. Not a priority over decarbonisation, but one that is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath – and should be.
To elaborate briefly on our second point: we hold that as a matter of logic all goals (including ‘mitigation’; for example, and crucially, the current Labour Government’s ‘mission’ to decarbonise the electricity supply) are vulnerable unless one has a strong adaptation strategy front and centre.
The point is analogous to why airline passengers who are parents are advised, perhaps counter-intuitively, to put on their own oxygen-masks prior to putting on their kids’; unless one has an adaptation strategy in place, then one has no strategy at all, for one is increasingly liable to get knocked out at the first severe hurdle. A real-life for-instance of this that we have uncovered is that the National Grid, which will become even more important under Labour’s mission, has no plan for dealing with colder winters.
These may come if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) switches off as a result of the melting of the Arctic: we return to this matter below.
Put in simple terms, our first point is that embracing adaptation is now the best way to “grow the pie” of climate action. Adaptation involves engaging with, and acting in response to, concrete threats. Our experience is that this type of action stands to appeal to people who have not had time or space to learn jargon terms like‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’. Such people also don’t know, usually, that these two forms of action are supposedly locked in a zero-sum competition.
All this is relayed in the report, which says:
This report advocates a shift in thinking about the relationship between adaptation and other climate priorities. It does not seek to alter the fundamental aim of climate campaigning. More than ever, every fraction of a degree of overheating that can still be prevented is critical, with millions of lives, whole ecosystems and tipping points of irreparable harm hanging in the balance.
And makes clear that we are:
aiming to raise the general profile of adaptation, as a priority in global and local climate response; to parity with the case for decarbonisation.
But we must avoid getting stuck in zero-sum frames because:
If a dwindling pool of resources is sucked into ever-growing reactive adaptation and disaster-recovery costs and decarbonisation is deprioritised, our trajectory towards collapse grows ever steeper.
So the whole point is the UK can’t successfully “focus” on adaptation instead of mitigation; strategic adaptation to our situation looks ‘upstream’, and there is nothing more upstream than carbon emissions: thus strategic adaptation must include decarbonisation. And it does.
No response will now make us safe, but society could unify around becoming safer. And when more people try to do so, and engage with the climate issue concretely, things could change. Obviously, we have to increase societal bandwidth for climate action if we are to mount a coherent response to climate chaos.
But the zero sum frame is powerful and very ingrained within the climate bubble. That is why our call can quickly be re-labelled by some as “refocusing” climate action on adaptation, a term that could be heard to imply looking away from decarbonisation.
This frame is so powerful that Fuller, internalising it, seems to have misread an entire section of the report on AMOC.
We argue explicitly that the potential changes to Britain’s climate from the very plausible breakdown of AMOC are so stark, that they prove adaptation, even strategic adaptation, cannot allay Britain’s climate fears. The section concludes:
Reflection on the AMOC risk should bring home a core insight of this report: while adaptation measures can bring direct benefits at the local level, they cannot replace decarbonisation.
However, reading from within the zero-sum frame, Fuller seems convinced that we think we can adapt our way out of AMOC!
Our takeaway. We must be careful to avoid the zero sum frame whenever we speak about adaptation.
Indeed,, to give adaptation its due we must break this frame. Luckily our experience shows that this frame is not very strong among the ⅔ of our population who is concerned but not involved.
They exactly are who SAFER is for.