Putting Adaptation and Mitigation together has never been more important

Greg Marsden and Theresa Nelson

Weather related disasters in Khatmandu, TampaFlorida and, more recently the Valencia region reinforce how vulnerable society is to climate change. This is set to get worse as the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise and the chances of remaining within 1.5C of warming decreasing year on year according to the IPCC.

In the summer of this year, the Greener Transport Council held a webinar, Shifting the Focus: Is Adaptation the Key to mainstreaming action on climate change? which we had the pleasure of running. The discussion was a response to the real challenge there is to honest debate around the mitigation challenge of climate change. Whilst it is important to recognise the key role that a shift to renewables and measures like the electrification of transport play, there remains a stubbornly limited interest in reducing demand for energy and, therefore, emissions. This is despite overwhelming evidence from the IPCC and academia that there are no carbon budget compliant pathways without both technology ad behaviour change and that they should be seen as intertwined not a choice of either or.

The webinar featured discussions and a Q&A with panellists Prof. Jillian Anable from ITS Leeds and the GTC, Rupert Read from the Majority Project, and Professor Rebecca Willis from Lancaster University. It explored whether galvanising action around climate breakdown could offer a way forward?

Jillian Anable argued that because our actions “do not match the unfurling facts and headlines about the climate change that is already happening,” this creates a cognitive dissonance that “drives discourses of denial to match inaction rather than galvanising action”. She set out her view that the endless hope and idea of the ‘happy ever after’ destination at the end of the rainbow of proposed pathways is serving to squash the truth and reality of the state we are in. So, rather than focussing on what we need to do for the sake of mitigation, we should look to what is necessary to adapt to increasingly significant and frequent climate events. Many of the measures we would take, she argued, work for both with the need for “a more multi-modal society, better use of existing infrastructure, and a circular economy;” Fundamentally, if we have a limited infrastructure budget then we need to focus that expenditure on strengthening and renewal and not on large amounts of new build. This takes us back to making better use of what we already have.

Rupert Read argued that increasingly there “will be some kind of weather related minor or major disaster…which will mean that it will take [the public] a lot longer to get there” than anticipated and so also argued that talking about transport means starting to take adaptation seriously. Rupert also argued that adaptation cannot “just rely on carbon heavy, hard engineering solutions” and that we have to “do” adaptation in a way that is “reality-based, that works with nature rather than against nature… that reduces carbon rather than increases carbon… [one] that takes seriously the power of people to innovate in social ways not just technological ways”. This is a critical observation, and previous work has shown how important this joint approach already is, and how it could be valued and nurtured further (see here).

Becky Willis showed that in her research people are worried about the climate crisis and that she consistently finds that it is politicians who are lagging behind on climate change, not the public. In interviews with MPs and other politicians, she has seen that, “MPs consistently underestimate where public opinion is on climate. Politicians consistently underestimate levels of support both for climate action generally and for specific policies. We see this time and time again… Our research shows that politicians are behind where people are, and people need to take the politicians with them.” Further, she argued that the public is sceptical of the government’s ability to address climate change problems at hand due to a lack of leadership from the government. What we need, Prof. Willis argued, is “a determined politician who shares the knot in the pit of the stomach, can take that, and transform it into something positive.” A common theme across the different speakers was the need for more radical policies that reduce emissions and build a mandate for change.

The increasing number, severity and widening geographies over which major climate disasters are being lived is really distressing. Net Zero by 2050 takes us away from the realities that climate change is already here and happening, with disastrous consequences. Do we need for disasters to unfold and for lives to be unnecessarily lost to recognise this? The risks should be galvanising action in ways it is currently not. This webinar proposed a new way forward which was to place the public need for action at the heart of the agenda. This means anticipating climate risk and taking the appropriate action to tackle it. The scale and uncertainties over where and how this might hit are such that we need to develop a response which is about how we live and move as well as the state and design of the infrastructure and services we move on. In practice this would mean galvanising more radical policy change. In our research it means reaching out across boundaries and joining up our conversations on mitigation and adaptation. To this end, two major centres, the Energy Demand Research Centre and the National Hub for Decarbonised, Adaptable and Resilient Transport Infrastructures will be developing a joint workshop to take this forward.