With all the extreme weather events that are happening in the world today, it can feel like the environmental changes that climate scientists have long warned us about are suddenly happening so fast. As such, I am sympathetic to a panicked reaction along the lines of: It’s all over, and we need to get in gear for our new Mad Max reality. But before you start recruiting a band of gauzy-gowned, machine gun-toting waifs, I think it’s worth revisiting the difference between climate mitigation and adaptation.

Climate mitigation includes everything we do to try to limit the amount of greenhouse gases that get into the atmosphere, in an attempt to avoid truly catastrophic levels of global warming: replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, constructing better-insulated buildings to conserve resources, reimagining our entire transportation system, and all that.

Climate adaptation includes everything we’re doing to try to reshape our lives given the scope of the climate crisis already underway, in addition to planning for what horrors might come down the line. Adaptation is an acknowledgement that this problem is probably going to get worse before — or indeed if — it gets better.

Climate mitigation is hard, and we are running out of time to do it, but I would argue that adaptation in its absence will actually be a million times harder. Without substantial cuts to our collective carbon imprint, many more lives will be lost trying to adapt to a changed environment, and countless more will be made meaningfully worse. Why wouldn’t we do what we can to avoid that?

Read the full article about mitigation versus adaptation by Eve Andrews at Grist.