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Adapting to Climate Change
Ashok Khosla
Despite growing scientific evidence that our present
patterns of consumption and production are leading to massive
disruption of the planet’s life support systems, particularly of our
climate and our living resources, governments continue to hide their
respective heads in the sand. International treaties have been
negotiated to slow down this headlong race to self-destruction, but
the foot on the accelerator pedal is stronger than the one on the
brake; the biggest polluters continue to be the biggest defaulters.
Given
the long lag times between cause (emission of greenhouse gases) and
effect (temperature rise), the global climate is in for change no
matter how soon the economies of the world reduce their use of
fossil fuels and cutting of forests. The remnants from 150 years of
profligate energy and material use will see to that. Much of this
change, which will in turn lead to changes in rainfall, sea levels,
frequency of natural disasters and other unpleasant phenomena is
widely considered to be unfavourable, if not outright harmful.
While
it is imperative that our scientists, environmentalists and
diplomats work day and night to rectify this state of affairs, and
bring about global agreements and national policies that will reduce
the future causes of global change (i.e., to mitigate them), it is
also now necessary to evolve ways to live with and respond to the
changes that will inevitably take place because of our past and
present practices (i.e., to adapt to them).
How do
we redesign our industry, transportation and agriculture so as to
make them less vulnerable to the climate changes that will take
place? The name of this game is “resilience”. Making human
activities more resilient takes proactive thinking and advance
planning. Industrial processes have to be made less dependent on
resources that will be adversely impacted by the external changes.
Agriculture, including the choice of crops and cropping patterns,
has to be redesigned to be resistant to droughts, floods, pests.
Transportation and power generation have to make greater use of
renewables. In other words, we have to strive towards sustainable
development.
It is
perhaps not surprising that any good strategy for coping with change
and disasters is not very different from that for preventing it in
the first place. Adaptation, then, requires much the same types of
action as does mitigation – because both depend on the adoption of
sustainable development trajectories. The motivation may be
different but the action required is often, and largely, similar.
This
becomes all the more important in a world where both population and
economic activity can be expected to grow for a long time to come –
probably for as long as we continue to have the inequities that
characterize the world today. As we hit against the limits set by
nature’s finite resources, we will find it more and more essential
to save, reuse, recycle our resources and simplify our lives.
But
this is not a popular insight, either among the affluent whose basic
needs are already met or among the poor who do not see why they
should be deprived of the things the affluent already have.
The
convergence between mitigation and adaptation is, of course,
possible only with the large scale introduction of sustainable
livelihoods and sustainable lifestyles – methods of production and
ways of living that are more in harmony than those of today with the
imperatives of nature. This means that appropriate technology and
the other solutions being pioneered by social enterprises such as
Development Alternatives become all the more important, not only for
local communities but also for the global economy.
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