Adaptation and Mitigation

In the ten years since the first National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, the science and policy landscape for adaptation has evolved significantly. Adaptation is emerging as an essential strategy for managing climate risk and a broad range of adaptation initiatives are being pursued across a range of geopolitical scales. This interest in adaptation has emerged from an increased awareness that climate impacts are unavoidable (Wetherland et al., 2001); a growing availability of knowledge, data, and tools for the assessment of climate risk; and the interest of government agencies, businesses, and communities in increasing their resilience to both current climate variability as well as future climate change. However, adaptation strategies are not generally mainstreamed into the policy apparatus of governments or the development plans of the private sector; in other words, adaptation strategies supplement existing planning efforts but often involve an effort on their own rather than being integrated into existing management and policy regimes. Also, although adaptation planning has an increasingly rich portfolio of case studies contributing to shared learning (Gregg et al., 2011), the implementation of adaptation plans has proceeded at a much slower pace.