Conservation in Context

Surviving Climate Change through Mitigationand Adaptation

We have not actually done any-thing large, at least on a national orglobal scale, to respond to the threatof climate change in the 20 yearsthat it has been a public issue. Butthe preferred theoretical responseamong global-warming cognoscentihas gone through three stages.

In the first, roughly 1988–2000,the focus was on mitigation—letus cut carbon emissions before thisthing gets out of hand. It was a pe-riod of relative optimism, and talkof adaptation seemed defeatist: if westart spending money on seawalls,we will never do what needs tobe done to prevent sea levels fromrising.

Between 2000 and about 2006, theBush administration prevented anyhope of real action in the UnitedStates, China became a carbon-basedpowerhouse, and the Kyoto Protocolfailed to seriously blunt the momen-tum of energy use, so we became rel-atively more pessimistic. As a result,adaptation seemed more necessary:we better think about building someseawalls because we are not sure wecan stop this thing.

From 2007 to the present, a pe-riod coinciding roughly with meltingof the Arctic sea ice, the science has

turned at least as dark as the politics.It has become clear that we are al-ready seeing severe manifestations ofclimate change—epic droughts andwildfires, the spread of pests such asthe pine bark beetle, and the rapidmelt of Arctic sea ice. We are alsowatching the projections of the ef-fects of future climate change growsteadily nastier.

There are plenty of people alreadytrying to figure out how to adapt.That is what humans do. But in fact,the main effect of the growing con-cern over climate change has been toreturn many scientists and activists toan all-out battle for mitigation. Thebattle is raging because we are fac-ing, unless we act very quickly, cli-mate change for which adaptationwill be essentially impossible. That is,sea-level rise of a foot or 2 would beextremely dangerous and difficult todeal with, but it is within the realm ofpossibility. Sea-level rise of 6 or 7 feetwould challenge the ability of civi-lizations to survive. As one Louisianaofficial faced with the task of figur-ing out new levee construction said,“There’s not enough mud and there’snot enough money.”

So I think David Orr is clearly cor-rect here. And I am not the only

one. As we have worked to buildthe organization 350.org in recentmonths, we have found our greatestallies among the UN bloc of coun-tries that are less developed andamong small island states. (350.orgis a global grassroots campaign de-signed to force action on climatechange and is premised on a recentresearch conclusion that 350 ppm isthe uppermost tolerable atmosphericconcentration of CO2.) Representa-tives from these countries still talkabout the need for adaptation fund-ing, which is a real need, but theypress much harder for swift, toughcuts in carbon emissions. The bannerthey raise at the UN meetings thatwill culminate in the big Decembertalks in Copenhagen carries a singleword: Survival. They know that sur-vival is not possible, no matter howmuch they try to adapt, unless cli-mate change can be sharply limited atmost. Otherwise, adaptation meansgrowing gills.

Bill McKibben

Environmental Studies Program, MiddleburyCollege, Middlebury, VT 05753, U.S.A., emailwmckibbe@middlebury.edu

796Conservation Biology, Volume 23, No. 4, 796C©2009 Society for Conservation BiologyDOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01275.x