04.
Striking the balance between adaptation
and resilience

Striking the balance between adaptation and resilience

While climate change conversations often focus on reducing emissions, mitigating its impacts is also of immediate concern. It will be interesting to see how money raised is allocated and spent.

This is especially true of the world’s poorer nations, where vast proportions of the population live near bodies of water and are susceptible to rising sea levels and fierce tropical storms.

But the increased frequency and severity of flooding in the UK should also act as a reminder that protecting people and assets from the impacts of an unpredictable climate should be a priority for our own governments and organisations, too.

When it comes to what form mitigation should take, conversations can get complicated. Any solution should ideally account for its own impacts on the environment, as well as serving its primary purpose of providing protection.

For that reason, things like nature-based solutions, which use natural processes to reduce the impacts of climate change while boosting biodiversity, are increasingly considered. But with the effectiveness of these solutions only becoming clear years down the line, proving value can be complicated.