Imagine you’re the captain of a sailboat. Water has started leaking into your boat, but you still have options since you caught it early. You could identify the leaks and patch them or turn your boat around and head for shore. Regardless, it would make sense to have everyone put on rubber boots to keep their feet dry.

Mitigation vs. adaptation

Although few of us will captain a sinking ship, we all live with climate change. Climate change is the long-term heating of the Earth’s climate due to human activities. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, like burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are natural fuels that form over long periods of time. They include oil, gas, and coal. Burning these fuels creates greenhouse gases, which trap heat at the Earth’s surface. The trapped heat causes global temperatures to rise.

Taking on climate change might seem like a lot to deal with. But many solutions are available. Some of the solutions aim to mitigate the effects of climate change. Mitigation refers to the actions taken to reduce the scale of a problem (such as stopping water from leaking into your ship). Climate change mitigation involves reducing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to slow and limit climate change. This process is also known as decarbonization. Climate change adaptation is how we change our behavior to protect people, places, and ecosystems from climate change.

Climate change mitigation strategies focus on one of two goals: reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we create or collecting and storing greenhouse gases elsewhere. Mitigation solutions include using more renewable energy instead of nonrenewable energy. Renewable energy sources, such as the wind and sun, replenish themselves. Mitigation is at the heart of most well-known climate change goals. One example is the global effort to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

You might not have heard much about climate change adaptation, however. Adaptation plans are often community- specific. That’s because every region faces its own environmental conditions and is affected differently by climate change. Plus, every community has a different set of resources available to them. Adaptation strategies focus primarily on one or more of the following goals:

1. Reducing vulnerability—A vulnerability is a weakness. Reducing vulnerability means reducing a community’s exposure and sensitivity to a disaster. For example, a community facing rising sea levels could restore coastal wetlands. These wetlands could protect the coastline from storms.
2. Increasing resilience—Resilience is the ability to deal with and bounce back from problems. Many plans that reduce vulnerability also increase resilience. A community facing sea-level rise could move important buildings and services to higher ground. This would make them more resilient to floods.
3. Expanding adaptive capacity—This goal involves learning to respond to disasters. For example, communities facing rising sea levels could train people to protect their homes from flooding. They could make an escape plan. Steps such as these would expand adaptive capacity.

Adaptation might mean building flood-resistant buildings in low-lying areas. It might mean expanding access to air conditioners to deal with extreme heat. Communities might improve forest management and develop drought- resistant crops. They might even move away from frequent disaster zones.

Where do mitigation and adaptation meet?

Mitigation and adaptation might seem entirely different, but they have much in common. Of course, how much adaptation is needed depends on how much mitigation we achieve. Some options are also helpful for both mitigation and adaptation.

Wetland restoration is one such example. Wetland restoration can be a form of mitigation since wetlands pull carbon dioxide from the air and store it. But wetland restoration can also be a form of adaptation. They help protect coastlines from storm damage by reducing their intensity.

Some forms of adaptation may reduce mitigation efforts, however. And it can work the other way around, too. One example involves the increased use of air conditioners in response to extreme temperatures. Many places are already just too hot for people to survive without them. But using more air conditioners means using more electricity, and far too much of our electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels. Mitigation and adaptation strategies are often closely interconnected.

Adaptation, mitigation, or both?

So, should we put all our efforts into adapting to climate change? Or should we focus our efforts on mitigation to reduce emissions as quickly as possible? Well, the fact is that we need to do both.

There’s no one climate change solution. Climate change happens on a scale, and its effects change dramatically as temperatures rise. At 1.5 degrees C of warming, 14 percent of the world will face a severe heatwave every five years. At 2 degrees C of warming, that percentage more than doubles to 37 percent. At 1.5 degrees C of warming, the average drought will last around two months— at 2 degrees C, it is four months. These differences determine whether individual people, communities, and ecosystems can recover.

Mitigating emissions now means less adaptation in the future. But we can’t focus only on mitigation—we also need adaptation plans. Climate change is already affecting people across the globe. These effects are being felt right now, from increased storm frequency and severity to drought and flooding.

We are also seeing that climate change does not affect us all equally. Those hit hardest by climate change often produce the least greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation solutions are needed on a practical and moral level. If we delay adaptation, the most exposed communities will face the worst climate change effects. This would be extremely unfair.

As the captain of a leaking ship, you have a lot of responsibility. You must focus on addressing the causes of the leak and preparing for its long-term effects. The same is true for addressing climate change. We need to pursue both mitigation and adaptation solutions. Understanding their connection will enable us to create a strong, sustainable, and fair future.