Mitigation is something people do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to increase the amount of greenhouse gas that is captured by our natural environment. Mitigation must be a global effort, and must include the world’s largest emitters of green house gases to be effective.
Adaptation and Mitigation Q&A
What does climate change mitigation mean?
What does adaptation mean?
Climate change adaptation means being prepared to live with the impacts of climate change. People changing the way they use with the environment to reduce the impacts of climate change, both now and in the future.
The impacts of climate change will not be the same for everyone around the world. How and to what extent an area becomes affected by climate change depends on many things such as location, local weather, natural habitats, governance, money, knowledge, communications and more. This means that adaptation strategies must be relevant to the area being affected .
For example, for a community of shrimp farmers an adaptation strategy could be to restore mangrove forests along their coastline to help protect them from flooding and coastal erosion caused by sea level rise and increased storms.
The impacts of climate change will not be the same for everyone around the world. How and to what extent an area becomes affected by climate change depends on many things such as location, local weather, natural habitats, governance, money, knowledge, communications and more. This means that adaptation strategies must be relevant to the area being affected .
For example, for a community of shrimp farmers an adaptation strategy could be to restore mangrove forests along their coastline to help protect them from flooding and coastal erosion caused by sea level rise and increased storms.
How are climate change mitigation and adaption related?
Mitigation and adaptation go hand-in-hand. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation we have to do. Mitigation takes place all around the world and is able to reduce all impacts of climate change. If there are less climate change impacts, then the need for people to adapt, or alter the way they live, to compensate for these changes is reduced.
What are the difference between mitigation and adaptation?
Mitigation:
- Is a global task that must include the world’s largest emitters
- The benefits of mitigation will be experienced in the future
- The benefits of mitigation will be experienced all around the world (just like the impacts of climate change are)
- Is driven primarily by global agreements and implemented by national policy-commitments
Adaptation:
- Action that happens at a localized scale. It can be community, provincial national and even regional.
- Immediate effect and results at a local level
- Driven primarily by communities themselves or by local governance
- Its actions are specific to the impacts in that area (it could be floods in one province and draught in the next one)
- Adaptation actions can differ between places
What are some examples of people adapting to climate change?
Community
Farmers planning aheadFarmers are some of the first people affected by climate change because of their close connection with the environment. Climate change is affecting areas of Isaan, the rice-growing region of northeast Thailand, contributing to both unprecedented droughts and floods.
Villages in Roi-et Province are suffering losses to their yields because of floods. Increased rainfall during the wet season has meant floods are becoming more frequent, which in turn has meant that the Jasmine rice they would usually plant during this season has not been able to grow, robbing farmers of that income.
To adapt to this climate change farmers have changed the variety of rice they grow and the time of year that they grow it. Instead of Jasmine rice, which is grown in wet soil during wet months, they plan to grow a variety that thrives is dry soils during dry months. The dry season is more predictable than the wet season, so by changing crops farmers have greater security on their income.
This is an example of smart adaptation to climate change. The farmers are using the information they have about weather patterns and are taking action to work in harmony with the change.
Business
Coca cola conserving waterWater consumption is rocketing day by day and water resources are decreasing. As a result of a corporate assessment, the Coca Cola company concluded that in the future, one of their main challenges would be water getting enough water, the main ingredient in their product. This assessment was a catalyst for the company to improve water-efficiency throughout their supply chain. At the same time, they set on a mission to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions and energy use.
They set the goal to improve water efficiency by 20% by 2020 compared to 2004, and stabilize carbon emissions even as the company grows. Now they are revising their processes and incorporating water-saving and energy-saving practices to reach these goals.
This is an example of a private business changing their practices to become more efficient at using natural resources. On the one hand, they are adapting to one of the consequences of climate change (water scarcity), on the other hand they are also working in climate change mitigation. Improvements like these, can lead not only to environmental benefit, but often also to long term cost reduction.
