Mitigation and Adaptation: Sustain Peace and Build Resilience through Climate Action
From the monsoon-on-steroids floods in South Asia, to the devastating drought in Africa, to violent competition for water in the Middle East, extreme climate events have pushed societies towards global humanitarian crises, instability, and conflicts. In all of these cases, climate change is not only the crisis itself but a threat multiplier that aggravates existing grievances and fuels instability, making it a recognised concern that challenges security on national, regional, and global levels.
As the link between climate change and security risks gains recognition, integrating climate action into international security risk assessment and management and committing adequate climate finance are emerging as top global priorities to diminish the compounded security risks and build resilience. This article explores the two main types of climate action - mitigation and adaptation - and offers strategic recommendations for sustaining peace.
Climate Mitigation: Limiting Climate Change
As scientific evidence points to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels for electricity as the main driver of climate change, stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere lies at the heart of limiting global warming and climate change. Efforts to reduce climate change - either by decreasing the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions or by enhancing carbon sinks that store these gases - are referred to as climate mitigation.
Based on the global consensus on limiting global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels, the ultimate goal of mitigation is to achieve net zero - or balancing greenhouse gas removals with greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, though mitigation options take various forms - from transitioning to renewable energy, improving energy efficiency, to expanding the size of forests - they all tackle the root causes of global warming and are key to avoiding, minimising, compensating or offsetting climate calamities.
Climate Adaptation: Adjusting to Climate Change
While mitigation aims at avoiding and neutralising human-induced climate change, the relentless rise of emissions and climate extremes has caused some irreversible effects. Therefore, adapting to climate change becomes another key strategy where residual impacts remain after mitigation. Climate adaptation refers to adjusting to actual or expected climate change - either by making ecological, social or economic changes in response to the adverse effects or by taking advantage of the opportunities that may arise.
Unlike mitigation, adaptation alleviates climate impacts by providing climate solutions tailored to each situation, taking into consideration factors such as geographic location, demographics, infrastructure, and institutional capacities. That is, adaptation strategies are never one-size-fits-all and can vary across communities based on their distinct characteristics. Common practices include diversifying crops and livelihood, relocating to higher ground, insuring assets, and setting up early warning systems.
Sustaining Peace and Security through Climate Action
While mitigation and adaptation cushion climate shocks, the nature of climate change as the ultimate threat multiplier makes its compounded risks too complex for either intervention alone to be sufficient to address. Tackling climate change as a threat multiplier is therefore imperative to break the climate-fragility feedback loop and sustain peace.
To achieve that, world leaders, policymakers and international institutions are tasked with incorporating conflict-sensitive, context-specific climate action into their humanitarian aid and peacebuilding efforts. Given that climate vulnerability is highly interlinked with the localised interplay of risk factors, mitigation and adaptation measures should be informed by thorough climate-security assessments and tailored to local contexts - such as institutional capacity and governance, allocation and access to natural resources, livelihoods of marginalised populations, and existing tensions between communities - particularly in fragile or conflict-prone areas. With considerations of local contexts, climate action and peacebuilding interventions are more likely to be effective and compatible with the larger environment, avoid unintended aggravation of existing inequalities and grievances, and strengthen resilience against future climate hazards.
Another factor enabling mitigation and adaptation to be successfully implemented is climate finance. While it is widely recognised that no climate instruments would work without sufficient financing, mitigation and adaptation finance flows not only failed to keep up with the global pledge of US$100 billion annually, but were significantly incommensurate to adaptation costs and financing needs. As the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main greenhouse gas emitted from human activities and the culprit of global warming - hits record high, the total adaptation finance needs are estimated to skyrocket to US$202 billion per year for the 2021-2030 period aside from incremental mitigation efforts. Dedicating adequate financing to cross-cutting mitigation and adaptation projects, following through on political commitments, and closing the climate finance gap are essential to the effectiveness of climate action.
As scientists warn that the international society is far behind in delivering on the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C, wide-ranging mitigation and adaptation measures offer solutions to limit climate change and enhance capacity to cope with climate stimuli. Only with an integrated climate-security management approach and adequate climate finance will these solutions be turned into successful climate action that neutralises the compound risk of climate change and contributes to building resilience against conflict and insecurity.