Editorial: Adapting to a Perilous Planet

Abstract

Imagine this future. With a tremendous amount of effort we have succeeded in creating an international treaty sufficient to put us on a path to stabilising dangerous climate change to no more than an increase of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. But even as output of greenhouse gases continues to go down, with so much CO 2 already in the atmosphere and oceans, the temperature continues to rise. While we are plausibly on a pathway of achieving our agreed upon targets for some modicum of climate safety, we won't actually achieve that goal for some time, and in the mean time we must prepare for a possible period of 'overshoot' beyond 2°C, until we eventually stabilise at 2°C. On top of this, we must brace those parts of the world that cannot tolerate a temperature increase even that high. This future will still include rising sea levels, increased droughts and more climate driven extreme weather events, along with an unfortunate cornucopia of attendant pressures on the environment, human health, and overall flourishing of life on the planet.What we have described is probably the best we can hope for at this point. Even with tremendous global efforts to bend down our current greenhouse gas emissions pathways, we cannot escape the necessity of adapting to a warming world. Given reasonable concerns that we will not be able to make the changes we need in the time we have to make those changes, the need for adaptation to a warmer world is even more urgent.This new world will challenge everything. Our previous social, political, moral and even conceptual frameworks may begin to look decreasingly relevant. We may find ourselves in a state of global environmental triage, saving only what we can and leaving the rest.To prepare for this world we need an ethics of climate adaptation at least as robust as the attempts that have been made for an ethics of mitigation, along with attendant schemes of distributive justice for emissions reductions. An ethics of climate adaptation will require that we balance practical solutions focused on political realities against imaginative solutions relying on our creativity and capacity to deal with the novel and unique. In addition to the political reality of ongoing climate change negotiations on adaptation, we need to consider how the pressure of urgent development needs, such as bringing people out of energy poverty, puts additional pressure on our approach to climate adaptation. The essays in this special issue point toward some possible paths for work in this area.Light and Taraska (2014) argue that climate change creates a relationship between states that, in some cases, strengthens the traditional justifications for state-to-state development assistance. The same rationale used to justify reducing climate emissions can also be used to justify development assistance. Those countries most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change are also those most in need of aggressive adaptation measures (2014: 130).

Tackling Climate Change, Breaking the Frame of Modernity

“…Policy failure is perhaps most evident in the designation of 2˚C as an acceptable target for global warming, associated by the UNFCCC with stabilising GHGs at 450 part per million (ppm) CO 2 equivalent, a level which has in fact already been exceeded. 1 Response now means substantive adaptation (Shockley and Light 2014), and that raises issues of compensation for those having costs imposed upon them including dislocation (Light and Taraska 2014). Things have moved much faster than many scientists, or environmentalists, expected.…”