“Climate change is here. Its impacts are becoming both widespread and more intense.
In three hours, the Climate Change Adaptation Workshops provide participants with the keys to collectively making the best possible decisions and avoiding maladaptation. Four objectives guide the process:
Define the scope of adaptation Adaptation (taking action on the consequences of climate change) is very commonly confused with mitigation (taking action on its causes). The workshop therefore begins with a brief clarification.
Acquire a methodology for making the right choices In the field of adaptation, poor decisions are frequently made unintentionally and often unknowingly. A structured methodology is therefore essential to avoid inadvertently increasing risk while attempting to reduce it — and above all, to maximise co-benefits.
Experience the collective dimension The workshop offers a collective intelligence experience and highlights that, without dialogue and collaboration among all relevant stakeholders, an adaptation measure is at risk of failing at the implementation stage.
Understand the urgency In adaptation as in mitigation, time is of the essence, and certain thresholds must not be crossed.”
Source and further information: Les Ateliers de l’Adaptation au Changement Climatique
Adaptation is not:
- a form of resignation: adaptation must go hand in hand with reducing the impact of human activities on the environment (“mitigation”);
- an exact science: it is an approach to be informed by the most robust data available, while also drawing on assumptions about the future and subjective judgements about what we most wish to preserve.
Adaptation is rather:
- in the well-established formulation: “avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable*”;
- reducing exposure and vulnerabilities while seeking to maximise co-benefits;
- driving transformations that go well beyond marginal adjustments;
- building the capacity of economies, territories, and social systems to function in the face of environmental change (I4CE).
*expression attributed to Italian climatologist Filippo Giorgi