Rethinking the Role of Adaptation in

Climate Policy
Objective:
To write an outline and key question that will promote thinking hard, thinking formally
and thinking rigorously.

1) We are going to start by refining what we think mitigation is. As IPCC says :
“Mitigation refers to prevention of future climate impacts on society through the
limitation of greenhouse gas emission” (Pielke, 353)
We think that mitigation is a way to prevent the climate change by just doing day to day
things that can help preventing it. For example when we share our car when going to school
in the morning, this helps by reducing the amount of CO​2​ that is produced by only using 1
car for more than 1 person.
And also IPCC refers to adaptation as:
“is concerned with responses to both the adverse and positive effects of climate
change. It refers to any adjustment – whether passive, reactive, or anticipatory – that
can respond to anticipated or actual consequences associated with climate change. It
thus implicitly recognizes that future climate changes will occur and must be
accommodated in policy” (IPPC, 1996ª, p831).
For example when we do our daily activities without taking in consideration the actual
weather, we can go to work, school or anything when it's raining, etc.

2) The effects of climate change upon ecosystems and cultures, mostly caused and
accelerated by said cultures and societies are present, real and noticeable, therefore it
should be addressed as such. There are basically two strategies to face the issues that
climate change represents, mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation refers to actions that can
prevent or de-accelerate climate change; while adaptation is a way of saying: “well, damage
is done. Let’s do something in order for us to not die”.
Either way, the response to climate change, being a worldwide phenomenon, needs to be a
plan adopted and used by every nation, government, organization and person on this planet
because it affects us all to some extent; and thinking of climate change as a non-profitable
activity just because it’s easier not to pay attention to it and pretend that everything is alright
should not be accepted.
Even though, as said previously, the effects of climate change are real and adaptation to
them is imperative, policies to address those issues haven’t taken the important role in
decision-making processes due to their unpopularity in political speeches.

3)How do we know if mitigation is more effective than adaptation or vice versa, and which
one is more viable?

4) For our believe we consider that mitigation is a better way to deal with climate change, but
sometimes adaptation is better for that specific case. For example when in a country there's
too much pollution already you can't mitigate it, so you have to adapt to it. Although
sometimes adaptation can be the best way to go, we still think that mitigation is better
because right now we can do little things to prevent what can happen in the near future or
even later on.
For example something that has been going on for a while is the thrash disposal, for the past
years we've been putting it in different containers depending on what they are. This has
helped a lot because before this was done all the trash was being dumped and that was just
making a lot of waste, but now that we split it we can recycle all the trash that we can re-use
or even make new stuff out of trash. This will help in the future because we are preventing
When we talk about the viability of both of them we can say that there no such thing as
deciding which one is more “viable” because in most cases you can´t decide between one or
the other, you only have an option. We could say that when that happens one becomes
more viable.