Description of Challenge
Even if emissions are stabilized relatively soon and mitigation is well considered, climate change and its effects will last many years, and adaptation will be necessary.The impacts of climate change are already resulting in economic losses around the world. Activities to adapt to the impacts of climate change also come with a range of costs and associated implications for the need for financial investments. In the specific context of climate change, adaptation means adjusting to a new set of climatic attributes, either new and unfamiliar from those already existing, or changing the parameters of existing attributes.
Solution
Adaptation to climate change is a response that seeks to reduce the vulnerability of biological systems to the effects of long term perturbations. Climate change adaptation is especially important in developing countries as those countries are predicted to bear the brunt of the effects. That is, the capacity and potential for humans to adapt (called adaptive capacity) is unevenly distributed across different regions and populations, and developing countries generally have less capacity to adapt. Adaptive capacity is closely linked to social and economic development.
The economic costs of adaptation to climate change are likely to cost billions of dollars annually for several decades, although the amount of money needed is currently unknown. Donor countries have promised an annual $100 billion by 2020 through the Green Climate Fund for developing countries to adapt to climate change. However, while the fund was set up during COP16 in Cancún, concrete pledges by developed countries are so far missing.
The adaptation challenge grows with the magnitude and the rate of climate change. A theoretical, physiological limit to adaptation is that humans cannot survive continual temperatures above 35C.
Even the most effective reductions in emissions, however, will not prevent further climate change impacts, making the need for adaptation unavoidable (Klein et al., 2007).
In a literature assessment, Klein et al. (2007) assessed options for adaptation. They concluded, with very high confidence, that in the absence of mitigation efforts, the effects of climate change would reach such a magnitude as to make adaptation impossible for some natural ecosystems. For human systems, the economic and social costs of unmitigated climate change would be very high.
