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Climate change adaptation refers to actions that help reduce vulnerability to the current or expected impacts of climate change like weather extremes and hazards, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, or food and water insecurity. Many adaptation measures need to happen at the local level, so rural communities and cities have a big role to play.
Climate change adaptation is the process of adjusting to the effects of climate change. These can be both current or expected impacts. [1] Adaptation aims to moderate or avoid harm for people, and is usually done alongside climate change mitigation. It also aims to exploit opportunities.
This article is part of:United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27. While efforts are ongoing to mitigate global warming, climate change is already impacting people’s lives. Climate change adaptation involves adjusting our behaviour and building improved infrastructure to better cope with changing weather patterns.
Because we are already committed to some level of climate change, responding to climate change involves a two-pronged approach: Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (“mitigation”); Adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline (“adaptation”).
- Adaptation as A Global Policy Response
- What Kinds of Adaptation Measures Are there?
- How Can Adaptation Reduce Vulnerability?
- How Does Investing in Adaptation Pay Off?
The Paris Agreement on climate change contains a global goal on adaptation: “to enhance adaptive capacity and resilience; to reduce vulnerability, with a view to contributing to sustainable development; and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of the goal of holding average global warming well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to h...
Adaptation measures may be planned in advance or put in place reactively. Low-income countries, and certain populations within them, tend to be more vulnerable to climate risks than developed countries, and some adaptation measures – such as increasing access to education and health facilities – will overlap with existing development programmes. Th...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes vulnerabilityto climate change as being determined by three factors: exposure to hazards (such as reduced rainfall), sensitivity to those hazards (which might be high, for example, in an economy dominated by rain-fed agriculture), and the capacity to adapt to those hazards (for example...
Research by the Global Commission on Adaptationfound a high rate of return on adaptation investment, with cost–benefit ratios between 2:1 and 10:1, or higher in some cases. It also found that investment of US$1.8 trillion before 2030 could create US$7.1 trillion in benefits, if targeted at five areas: early warning systems, climate-resilient infra...
An initial assessment is needed of the extent to which climate change is affecting or will affect natural systems (e.g. by altering water availability, thus negatively affecting agriculture and food security) and human societies (e.g. by increasing temperature, thus encouraging the spread of climate-sensitive diseases).
The National Adaptation Plan (NAPs) process was established under the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF) and enables Parties to formulate and implement national adaptation plans (NAPs) to reduce vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, by building adaptive capacity and resilience and to facilitate the integration of climate change ...
