Climate Change Adaption and Mitigation

Simply described, climate change mitigation is the action of reducing the production of greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas climate change adaptation means modifying our actions and activities to protect the environment from the impacts of climate change. The two concepts are intertwined and sometimes difficult to be discussed separately.

Sustainable transportation, clean energy, waste management, and energy efficiency solutions are examples of climate change mitigation. On the other hand, climate adaptation concerns how to manage disastrous situations caused by extreme weather conditions, flood protection, and how to upgrade infrastructures to be more climate friendly.

There are important aspects that influence both climate change adaptation and mitigation in a positive way. Examples of these aspects are public engagement, education, local food production, water conservation, and so forth. While climate mitigation usually concerns a long-term issue at an international scale, climate adaptation mostly has a short-term effect and provides benefits at a local scale.

A third concept which is related to both adaptation and mitigation is resilience. Climate resilience highlights the fact that nations should become more resilient to the effects of climate change. This is closely related to the climate adaptation concept which is taking steps to adapt to the effects of global warming, as well as climate mitigation with the intention of slowing down the rate of global warming.

Monitoring environmental changes and emissions is one important step towards achieving climate adaptation and mitigation. In so doing, data science can be of help, as we will see in the following activities throughout this week.