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Adaptation and Mitigation: A Formal Definition

There are 2 broad ways of looking at climate change: the conventional approach limits itself to identifying and quantifying the potential impacts of such change on various environmental and economic systems. This is a desired approach to understand the dynamic interactions between atmosphere, land, oceans and ice and biosphere; but this science-centric, top down approach fails to assess the regional impacts of climate change and abilities of communities to adapt to climate driven changes.

The second approach uses bottom-up vulnerability driven techniques to assess past and present vulnerabilities vis-à-vis existing adaptation strategies, and possible modification of such strategies with climate change.

The inability of developing countries, who are in general more vulnerable (due to factors such as location, greater dependence on agricultural or natural commodities, lower per capita availability of resources such as land, water, capital, public services etc.) to respond to climate changes would have serious consequences. However, appropriate policy decisions can help such countries by triggering pro-poor investment, while promoting environmentally sustainable practices. Mitigation involving carbon offset and carbon trading can help generate income in developing countries while increasing adaptive capacity. The fourth assessment report of the IPCC concludes that a combination of mitigation and adaptation based strategies would be prudent.

Adaptation versus Mitigation

Mitigation has conventionally attracted more attention than adaptation, both from the science and policy angles. Since climate change emerged as a problem in natural science, the method of natural science, breaking down a problem in a manner amenable to scientific analysis was used initially, and mitigation as a strategy was the natural choice.

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* Contributed by: -
Suddhachit Mitra, is a research (M. Phil) student of Management at the West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata.