Adaptation: The Ultimate Challenge

WWF climate change adaptation expert Kit Vaughan talks about the limits of adaptation, and how climate change will shake the very foundations of our society.

A certain amount of climate change is inevitable. How can we adapt to this?
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Mankind has met adaptation challenges before. What makes climate change different?
Adapting to climate change is not something new; we have been doing it as society for thousands of years. People and species have always adapted to changing climates. What is different is the speed and the scale of the changes we are facing.

In the last 300 or 400 years, we have built our society and economies on an assumed stable environment. If you look at houses built near a river, you see that they are all built in what people considered to be a fairly safe place, a few meters above the water, the highest tide, etc. But that is now changing, and so the baseline for our society changes.

So apart from thinking twice before buying waterfront property, what else will we have to consider?
We have been building houses to withstand a certain maximum of temperature change in the summer. What we are going to see in a world that is three, four, five degrees warmer is that our houses, hospitals, and schools will be too exposed to sun and heat. The same is true for biodiversity, ecosystems, and species. They have adapted to fit certain niches, and these niches are now changing and so will they. They are either forced to adapt, migrate, or go extinct.

The difficulty is how to support adaptation in a world with nine billion people, increased demands for food security and natural resources, and increasing climate stress, while you get more storms, more drought, and smaller crop yields and so on. The dynamics of our ecosystems and our societies are changing and we will have to learn how to adapt where possible. That is what adaptation is about: learning to live with these impacts, and learning to respond to these risks and building in resilience where possible.

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