“It will be chaos,” the boy said.  He was the youngest member of the audience at our final show of the 2023 tour.  Simple, prescient, honest.

Life adapts to normality.  Resilience survives catastrophe.

Life adapts to normality: the slowly shifting undercurrents of new normals.  In catastrophes, such as the ‘Great Dying’ of the late Permian or the Chicxulub Impact Event, life-forms and life-ways survive if they prove to be resilient to the consequent stressors. The science suggest, as listed in Lazarus Taxon,  survivors are typically:

• Adaptive
• Eurytopic[i]
• A complex generalist
• Located near potential refuges
• Lucky

Although homo sapiens in the Northern Hemisphere did weather significant climatic changes as the last Ice Ages ended, we did it primarily through migration: ebbing and flowing with the pulses of chill.  We did not adapt: we relocated within a wider global landscape.

As a consequence of 250 years of fossil fuel exploitation, change is coming faster than we (and many other species) can outbreed or outrun it.  Evolution is not an option, especially for homo sapiens with our long reproductive cycle and limited innate resilience.  And the areas of the Earth that might be designated ‘refuges’ are far more limited than in the past and are already heavily populated and over-exploited.

We can either get out of the way of the change or we can adapt at the software level of behaviours and cultural practices in ways that safeguard not only our own lives but those of the other lifeforms that share this space. 

Our hardware – and even our firmware – is not nimble enough to flex with this rate of change.

Climate discourses focus on mitigation and adaptation

From the earliest days of our collective consciousness of the climate emergency ( c. 2000 CE), discussions around response and agency have focussed on 2 key themes: mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation focusses on measures to constrain the anthropogenic drivers of climate change in order to limit  the medium and long term degree of change e.g. keep average global temperature increase  to less than 1.5 degrees higher than the pre-industrial baseline.

Adaptation focusses on how lifeways might change in the context of the ‘baked in’ effects of increasing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and oceans.

The two processes, of course, slide across each other like the components of a slide-rule.

This post focusses on issues around the current adaptation discourse as informed and inspired by feedback during Pibroch’s 2023 tour. 

The current political discourse, globally and locally, maps adaptation exclusively onto socio-technological adjustment. 

Life-forms are not expected to become dramatically more heat-tolerant, resistant to acid attack or amphibious in the forecast timescales for change – though the most ‘resilient’ species may thrive and invade ecological niches currently occupied by less ‘resilient’ species.  Nor does the current discourse centre on a free-play of biopower, the unfettered migration, colonisation and decolonisation  of biomes in the face of climate drivers. 

Whilst the practical emphasis of most current national policies is simply ‘acceptance’[ii]  – an essentially laissez-faire approach to  geophysical processes – community and political strategies, in practice, focus on evasion and fortification, underpinned by large amounts of greenwashing and sporadic virtue-signalling.  The default response of democratic polities is PR.

The inherent short-termism of current political elites – especially in the liberal democratic nation-states of the North – encourages buck-passing and free-riding.  ‘Democratic’ institutions which were (and are) fundamentally conservative[iii] and colonialist are characterised by in-built inertias.  Inertias which lock-in dysfunctional behaviours and which work against the need for nimbleness and dynamic collective action in a decadal time frame.

The only collective action nation-states implement effectively is to make war – whether on their host or on alien populations: which, after all, was what they were developed to do.

Problem definition : Adaptation to what?

Problem definition is fundamental to modern rational/ scientific decision-making and the design and implementation of ‘solutions’.

The water-mark of the Anthropocene is engineering: it has been a fundamental inspiration and driver of ‘development’.   Though mercantile capitalism and imperialism existed before the Anthropocene, it was the shift from bio-energy (whether human & animal labour or burning wood) to the adoption of machinery with inorganic drivers – water, wind and, most importantly, fossil fuels – that initiated the accelerating growth and environmental degradation of the last three centuries.

Engineering offers brute and atomised solutions to narrowly defined problems, typically realised through projects executed under contract.

But, in the face of the poisoning of the entire global ecosystem by greenhouse gases and the environmental degradation that fossil power has enabled, any problem that can be narrowly defined is not really the problem.

Shared problem definition is also fundamental to  inclusive collaborative, and thereby ‘just’, decision making.

Fundamental terms underpinning the issues of adaptation remain silent, at least in mainstream public discourse.

Are we ‘adapting’?

Hardware (organisms)? Software (behaviours)? Or firmware (infrastructure)?

What is it that is adapting? 

The global ecosystem? The global economy? The corporation? The nation-state? The population? The community? Individuals? The biome?

What is it adapting to?

The local weather? Changes in fertility? Shifts in patterns of trade? Changing patterns of employment? Mass migration? The demand for restorative justice? Redistribution of wealth? The atomisation of society?

Why do we need to adapt?

To survive? To protect our standard of living?  To sustain our well-being? To preserve our existing political structure? To perpetuate human civilisation? To safeguard future generations? To avoid a mass extinction? Because it is the right thing to do?

The ‘how’ of adaptation – solution design – is, of course, dependent on the framing of answers to the above questions.  The prognosis of rapid change, agreed by the scientific consensus, is indifferent to when it suits ‘us’ but defines the ‘when’ of adaptation as NOW!

Evasion is not adaptation.

One euphemism which emerged repeatedly out of discussion during the Pibroch tour was Managed Retreat. 

Particularly with regards sea-level rise and flood risk, governments and communities[iv] are considering abandoning acreage and relocating to ‘higher ground’.  The lifeways and habitats of these present loci are deemed non-viable in the face of the ‘coming change’. 

But is  that an average change?  A tipping point change?  North Atlantic Overturning Circulation?  West Antarctic Iceshelf?  Permafrost melt?  Submarine hydrates?  The Greenland ice mass? 

Managed or unmanagable retreat in action.

The scientific consensus forecasts the geophysical impacts of change will be unevenly distributed, with transitions more severe at low and high latitudes.  But the increasing instability in weather systems at mid latitudes is already eroding wealth and fertility.  Explosive storms and slow moving heat-domes disrupt conventional patterns of pollination, flourishing, fructation , harvest and die-back: they  topple forest habitats or consume them in fire. 

Of course, ‘managed retreat’ has been informal policy for decades in the parching territories of the Sahel or the Hejaz or the torrid zones close to the equator.  Humanity is implementing managed retreat on an epic scale.

Many vital lifeforms and lifeways will not manage their retreat at the required pace, however.  Some species edge toward higher altitudes or latitudes at the pace of seed scatter.  Most cannot afford the energetic cost of a rubber dinghy.

Is migration – with its concomitant abandoning and destitution – the best we can do to adapt?  And, for those who live in less-severely disrupted locations:  what should adaptation mean to them?  Inclusion?  Austerity? Solidarity?

At an (almost) trivial level,  during the tour, we encountered the Inverclyde Energy Masterplan covering both sides of the River Clyde from the tidal reach near Clyde Gateway in the East of Glasgow, through to the opening of the river between Gourock and Dunoon. The Energy Masterplan boundary is approximately 500 m from the North and South banks of the river Clyde. An additional 2,000 m buffer is included to support the potential for future extensions of ‘successful low carbon energy and infrastructure projects’. The Energy Masterplan should be ‘viewed as a resource to support investment in low carbon heating and energy infrastructure in the Energy Masterplan area’.

The masterplan, therefore, defines an adaptive response in terms of a 2.5 km corridor where ‘mitigation’ (low carbon energy and infrastructure projects) and ‘adaptation’ (managed retreat to higher ground) will be subsidised.

The problems arising from arbitrary definition of corridors of impact has been explored by Andrew Barry in Material Politics[v].

Essentially, the ethos is that  a limited number of victims will be subsidised – a little: but only if you are within the corridor(be it a pipeline-route, a new high speed train line or an expanding river-system).  It does not address the underlying sociopolitical drivers of the catastrophe or the experience of those located just outside the corridor. As with 19^th Century Poor Laws in Scotland, it does not believe in supporting the able bodied and undeserving ‘poor’.

Meanwhile “The UK government is to spend millions of pounds helping countries prepare for future humanitarian disasters in a radical shake-up of its development policy, the BBC has learned.” [vi]

Disaster preparedness is not adaptation.  It is a pathetic, sotto voce admission of climate guilt on the part of a major polluter in the hope that the ‘managed retreat’ of others can be postponed.

Morality, pragmatism and opportunity of adaptation.

I know a fellow-activist who holds the view that discussion of adaptation is immoral:  that anything other than successful mitigation fails life on Earth.  There was a time when I saw great merit in that stance but, in a few short years, the window for ‘success’ has closed.  As Andreas Malm has pointed out, societal indifference and geo-physical climate responses have both ‘exceeded expectations’ in the intervening decade.  It is a scunner that the response to the grief and the science has been no more than “Blah-blah-blah.”

Questions around adaptation constitute, as Stephen Gardiner has elaborated, a ‘Perfect Moral Storm’ for the current population of Earth, however[vii].  We must – and I do mean must – address central moral questions collectively, communally. It is essential that we get on the same page on these questions.

What duties do currently ‘living’ individuals owe to other ‘living’ individuals[viii] whose well-being and life-prospects are being damaged by our own ‘pursuit of happiness’? (And what is the spatial, ethnic or behavioural horizon of that obligation?)

What duties do currently ‘living’ individuals owe to individuals who might ‘live’ in the future (and how distant a future)?

What duties do currently ‘living’ individuals owe to other ‘living’ individuals whose well-being and life-prospects have been damaged by the actions of our ancestors?

The dialectic tension between duty (debt) and rights immediately impresses itself.

What are the rights of currently ‘living’ individuals?  (And what is the spatial, ethic or behavioural horizon of those rights?)

What are the rights of currently ‘living’ individuals?  (And in how distant a future?)

What are the rights of no longer ‘living’ individuals for which we owe reparation?  (And in how distant a past?)

These are questions which the conventional philosophical infrastructure (secular or revealed) seem inadequate to address.

Modern secular politics assumes a stable landscape, the nominal Holocene, and, as such, can and does ignore the temporal axis: since we are all in the same environmental boat, dog might as well eat dog (as they did in the past and may do in the future). 

Except dogs are not notoriously cannibalistic and we are not in the same environmental boat: the ‘actions’ of modernity have holed the future below the waterline, its ‘progress’, to this point, powered by generations of galley-slaves, chained below deck.  And too few of us are manning the pumps!

Modern secular politics is not fit-for-purpose in the current predicament.  It is, to lean back on the cliché, rearranging the deck-chairs.

But there is, as always, a pragmatic aspect to adaptation.  We are time-limited (by already baked-in contamination) and encumbered by the vested interests, historical investments, desire, cultural entanglements and technical capabilities we co-habit.

I am 65.  Five years ago, the urgency of this struggle (for me)  was to secure some well-being for my grandchildren.  Same species.  In-group.  Already living. Frankly, privileged (compared to others)  by the social capital available to them.

On the flip side, I like the food, shelter and ‘entertainment’ I can afford on my fossil-fuel pension.  I’ll happily die and pass them on but how much of them am I willing to give up while there is breath in me?

Some of the feedback from the audiences during the Pibroch tour was bleak.

None of which encourages the sentiment:” We can adapt!”

In the context of the current ‘baked -in’ geophysical dynamic, ‘we are’, ‘we can’t’ and ‘no one wants’ feel like counsels of despair: and yet these ‘dreads’ are clearly authentic.

This, surely, is the challenge of any rhetoric of adaptation: to adapt we must want, can and will…

Change

The ‘science’ of persuasion insists:

1. that living individuals will fight harder to retain what they have than to gain what they haven’t (though, to qualify, presumably, you have to ‘have’ something in the first place).
2. that living individuals are more motivated to change by opportunity than threat (somewhat contradictory)
3.  that living individuals have to see (i.e. imagine) a path to a ‘better’ outcome.

For most of the living individuals on Earth, whether humans living on the Ganges delta, the Sumatran Orangutan, the Yangtze Finless Porpoise or the Bluefin Tuna, there isn’t a lot to lose.  For most life-forms and life-ways on Earth, change is ONLY an opportunity.  But, to realise this collective opportunity,  we must navigate the simple pragmatics of change:

1. Deciding what changes are required.
2. Persuading the ‘losers’ that their losses are justified
3. Balancing the risks of each action with those of inaction

Solutions, projects, contracts and their discontents.

Since at least the early modern period, material change has been seen to be most  ‘effectively’ delivered by a compartmentalisation of problems (and solutions) – build this mill, make this road, dam this river, extract that oil reservoir, inoculate that population – with  scant attention to the wider impacts of achieving these limited project goals e.g. loss of habitat, funnelling of trade away from areas remote from corridors, dependency on corporate providers, the externalities (like pollution or climate change) which are off-the-balance sheet. The technics of the Anthropocene are very effective at defining limited objectives then realising those aims as installed infrastructure.  They are less effective at intuiting the entanglements and co-dependencies which arise from each innovation or addition.[xiii].

In the global North, the mediation between solution seekers and ‘problem’ solvers has generally been the contract: a device to manage obligations and liabilities between nominal strangers. The formal contract is an artefact which arises from mistrust and disconnection.

As Barry has pointed out, contracts are the connective infrastructure of capitalism, knitting together corporations and states through projects.  Contracts also provide elements of infrastructure between corporations and individuals.  They do not, however, bind all stakeholders in a single, consensual web.  Living individuals of different species or of who are of no material interest to the supplier are not parties to contract.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not enforceable as contract – most living individuals have neither the resources nor the time for litigation – and there is no Universal Declaration of the Rights of Living Individuals (past, present and future).

If there is no possible contract, how can there be a governable project?

In any case, the project is a questionable device of our times[xiv].

1. projects are modular but the heterogeneous material and organic world is continuous.
2. projects rely on the success of previous projects (in different times and spaces).
3. projects are situated but the solutions we seek are, by definition, global.
4. incomplete or failed projects outnumber successful ones but we cannot afford failure on a global scale.

The challenge is “how do we reform (not adapt) our ingrained default ‘problem solving’ paradigm into something which is immediately and pervasively effective (i.e. revolutionary) and sustainable (i.e. culturally embedded)?”

Technics of adaptation

Meanwhile, on the Titanic, the inter-governmental ‘scientific consensus’ continues to earnestly offer hope of deeper adaptations[xv].

Effectiveness of adaptation in reducing climate risks is documented for specific contexts, sectors and regions (high confidence). Examples of effective adaptation options include:

•        cultivar improvements,

•        on-farm water management and storage,

•        soil moisture conservation,

•        irrigation,

•        agroforestry,

•        community-based adaptation,

•        farm and landscape level diversification in agriculture,

•        sustainable land management approaches,

•        use of agroecological principles and practices (high confidence).

Ecosystem-based adaptation  approaches such as urban greening, restoration of wetlands and upstream forest ecosystems have been effective in reducing flood risks and urban heat (high confidence)[xvi].

Unfortunately, with the possible exception of ‘cultivar improvements’ and the vague ‘community-based adaptation’, these are not examples of adaptation but merely shifts in investment strategies at a societal level.  They are, at best, innovations –at worst unlicensed technology transfers – which do not enable profound shifts in lifeways and underpinning belief systems. And, as Andrew Barry has pointed out, “innovation is the enemy of transformation” :  and evolution is fundamentally transformative.

The only political item on the IPCC’s list is the gnomic portmanteau term ‘community based adaptation’ – as though community agency would be innovative (which, of course, for most of the colonial period, it would have been).

The technics above, whilst evidently valuable to material survival, do not adapt ‘us’ to the developing emergency unless they are complemented by fundamental transformations in our belief systems and property relations – the software and firmware of our lifeways.  In isolation, they merely enable the status quo ante to be sustained a little longer.  They delay the inevitable managed retreat of those in the most extreme stress-zones and, perhaps, limit the scale of retreat (and increase the scale of ‘suffering-in-place’). 

They preserve the property rights of the current elites for a little longer.  In this respect,  they represent an additional buffer of mitigation for the established order which has carried us to this predicament.

The missing elephants in this summary are:

• Thou shalt not burn
• Thou shalt not waste
• Thou shalt not accumulate

These are, surely, the central adaptation which must be embedded in organismic and cultural practice?

• Thou ‘shalt not’ convert fossil (or contemporary) carbon into carbon dioxide or methane.
• Thou ‘shalt not’ discard anything that might have residual value to some persisting living individual.
• Thou ‘shalt not’ accumulate more than you can consume in your organic cycle.

How communities and individuals internalise & operationalise these three commandments lies at the root of effective adaptation.  It is a spiritual, cultural and, conceivably, religious question. This is the dharma of our predicament.

Barriers to adaptation

If we are “living through climate collapse in real time’[xvii], the vital priority is to remove the barriers to adaptation.  The IPCC list the key barriers to adaptation as:

•        limited resources,

•        lack of private sector and citizen engagement,

•        insufficient mobilization of finance (including for research),

•        low climate literacy,

•        lack of political commitment,

•        limited research

•        slow and low uptake of adaptation science,

•             low sense of urgency

These might usefully be considered as two sub-groups – supply side barriers and demand side barriers.

Whilst the elites who currently control resources and infrastructure vex about ‘doing the right thing at the right time’ (to avoid blame or short term regret), we know, based on robust science, that ‘business as usual, now and in the near-term’ is the WRONG THING.

According to the IPCC,  There are widening disparities between the estimated costs of adaptation and the finance allocated to adaptation (high confidence). Adaptation finance has come predominantly from public sources, and though a small proportion of global tracked climate finance was targeted to adaptation,  an overwhelming majority went to mitigation (very high confidence). Although global tracked climate finance has shown an upward trend since 2014, current global financial flows for adaptation, including from public and private finance sources, are insufficient and, therefore, constrain implementation of adaptation options, especially in developing countries (high confidence)[2]

If governance systems and corporations are not fit-for-purpose in the face of this unique predicament, isn’t demand-side adaptation a more malleable and fast-acting strategy. 

But this will require:

1) The radical rethinking of rights, needs and desire at an individual level.

2) The radical reduction in demand at a global level

The global financial system is awake to the fact that climate catastrophes are not ‘Acts of God’ (and therefore externalities accommodated by actuarial analysis).  The severity of hurricanes, floods, wildfires and heatwaves are Acts of Man…not to mention war, famine and pestilence. We, collectively, individually and historically, are liable: but to whom? 

To ourselves.  To all future living individuals and communities.

Regime change

Adopting a Multi-Level Perspective , sustainable ‘solutions’ can be analysed at 3 levels[xviii]  – landscape, regime, niche.  Each individual lifeform, to the simplest protozoan, is implicated in a niche.  For ecosystems, communities and individual organisms, climate change is landscape.

So, what will it really take to achieve a degree of adaptation in the face of the current unprecedented rate of change?

We don’t have much time for this but the last 2 decades have demonstrated that our current political systems (including capitalism) are neither nimble nor capable of pace.

If the genuine interest of communities and individuals (of whatever species) is the well-being of themselves AND future instances of life and community, this model suggests that change can (and must) come from the ‘innovations’ (i.e. changes in lifeway) of ‘small networks of actors’ based on reformed ‘expectations and visions’.

Mediating such energy and insight as exists, limited though it may be, has been stymied by the  inertia of the regime and the wilful self-interest of elites (including the historically privileged citizenry of the colonialist Global North).

It is the regime, as defined in the MLP model, which must be radically rethought, destabilised and re-configured. 

Whilst recognising that models, such as MLP,  are, in themselves, part of the Regime, the model proposes that we – all living life – must enter a rapid diffusion phase as a matter of urgency.  Eliminating the demand side barriers, we have to

• Associate – Increase our interpersonal engagement with revised expectations and visions
• Educate – Increase our climate literacy at all levels, supply and demand side, and engage in critical conversations at the inter-personal, community and global level.
• Change – revise our expectations and express and act upon our intentions to achieve new visions through direct political action in areas such as consumption, migration, co-production and representation.

It seems to me that the closest analogies available to us for this are religious revivals – grass roots driven, enthusiastic and evangelical.  A radical recentring of meaning.  We need to invest in preachers not carbon sequestration or EVs.  We need to invest in communal spaces.  We need to invest in imagination and conversation.

This will be a delicate business.  Barbara Walter’s has described how the risk of inter-communal violence increases as polities shift from democracies to anocracies and formerly privileged groups (White Christian Males in the USA, for example) resort to direct and violent action of mitigate their perceived losses[xix]. 

Conclusion

Whilst response to the current climate emergency has been discussed in terms of mitigation and adaptation from the outset, analysis shows that inadequate mitigation projects have been given priority over adaptation projects.

I would suggest that this reflects the fact that mitigation protects and favours the socio-political status quo ante – political and propertied elites whereas effective adaptation demands a fundamental shift in property and power relations.

To date, government and corporate stakeholders have failed to deliver on pledges of questionable adequacy in the face of the escalation of the extremity of climate impacts. Meanwhile, proposals for use of investment are framed in terms of the design and implementation of modular socio-technological fixes (through contracted projects) rather than thorough-going adaptation to the new reality of escalating climate stress. Nation-states and corporations are not ‘fit-for-purpose’ in the emergency: nor, however, would be ‘global government’ without a fundamental underlying shift in vision and expectations.

The priorities for ‘investment’ in adaptation, should therefore be in:

association – reforming and rebuilding community solidarity and agency at grass-roots level

education – creating forums for agentic discussion and shared commitment informed by ethical and scientific wisdom and knowledge.

change – empowering and implementing change, safely and equitably, through a value-based reformation of demand

Together, I believe these initiatives, at a local, regional and global level, open the possibility of removing the demand- and supply-side barriers to adaptation and allowing grass-roots adoption of socio-technical and the creation of refuges which nurture and sustain all life.

[i] (of an organism) able to tolerate a wide range of habitats or ecological conditions

[ii] A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change – Stephen M. Gardiner, Oxford 2011

[iii] Conservative, after all, equals preservative – to preserve the immediate socio-economic status quo.

[iv] Though predominantly the former.

[v] Material Politics : Disputes Along the Pipeline, Andrew Barry, Wiley Blackwell 2013

[vi] UK government plans radical shake-up of foreign aid for climate change disasters – BBC News

[vii] S.M. Gardiner ibid.

[viii] Of any species.

[xiii] Entangled – Ian Hodder – Wiley Blackwell 2012

[xiv] Andrew Barry, Centre for Energy Ethics Conference 2023

[xv] IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf

[xvi] IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf

[xvii] COP28 Opening Speech, Antonio Guitterez

[xviii] PowerPoint Presentation (exeter.ac.uk)

[xix] How Civil Wars Start – Barbara F. Walter Penguin 2022