This is the third installment in our series pulling back the curtain on the thought process behind how we update our flagship Learning for Action course. The first two editions are here and here.
To what extent is adapting to the perils of our warming world now a practical and life-saving necessity? How might this distract from the vital work of stopping the planet from getting even hotter? These are some questions we’ve been mulling here at Terra.do amid our latest round of class updates.
In the 12-week arc of our Learning for Action course, the class on adaptation had long sat near the end. This prompted questions like: Does that risk it going overlooked or feeling like an afterthought—and should we cover it sooner? This speaks to a broader question running through much of the course: When it comes to climate action, what’s worth prioritizing?
The quick answer is we have to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases like CO2 and methane by curbing our reliance on fossil fuels and rapidly scaling up clean energy. But many of the specifics beyond that depend on your context and value judgments. That’s a key throughline worth unpacking for a moment.
What are you prioritizing?
When evaluating climate solutions, you might consider raw speed and economic efficiency to be paramount: What gets the best bang for the buck the fastest?
This is a reasonable starting point, but it risks overlooking certain areas where climate action is critical but the results are squishy, like communications. Atmospheric scientist, author, and all-star climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe says the most important thing you can do to fight climate change is talk about it. The impact of that is hard to quantify, but it’s not zilch.
With this in mind, our courses factor in other values, like climate justice. In short, climate impacts tend to disproportionately hurt the people who are the least responsible for causing this crisis, and who have the least resources to deal with it. So what can folks with more privilege do about it?
One approach here is what author and systems-thinking expert Elizabeth Sawin calls multisolving, or "using one investment of time or effort to solve several problems at once in a way that also improves equity." An example is a clean energy project to lower the need for fossil fuels, while also providing a community with cheaper electricity and cleaner air. From weatherizing homes to adding sidewalks and bike lanes, opportunities to multisolve abound if you’re alive to them.
Importantly, our course strives to examine not just what you can do about climate change, but ways this effort can help people more broadly.
Mitigation, adaptation, and suffering
So how might this inform our discussion on adaptation?
Some key vocab: Climate wonks differentiate between mitigation—that is, minimizing heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere—and adaptation, or finding ways to deal with impacts it’s too late to avoid, like more intense heat waves and storms, which can in turn drive food insecurity, migration, and so on.
"We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering," Harvard climate expert John Holden once said. "We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be."
That was in 2007. Since then, many opportunities for mitigation have been missed. Despite progress on cheap renewables, batteries, and electric cars, the need remains immense. But to forestall even worse suffering, the need for adaptation is hard to ignore. That’s especially true when 2024 and 2023 set records for the most billion-dollar weather disasters globally, with 58 and 73 respectively.
This brings us back to our latest course updates, and whether it might be better to address adaptation before the final week of classes. Perspectives on our learning team varied. Some of this reflected a debate about whether adaptation qualifies as a climate solution, because again, it does nothing to stop the planet from getting hotter. Some if it went deeper.
Adaptation in context
There’s a concern that loose talk of adaptation can give the wrong impressions—for instance, that we’re already past some critical threshold to avert the worst impacts of climate change (we’re not) or that with enough concrete and air conditioning, the more privileged among us can devise ways to comfortably ignore it.
Good luck with that, but some people certainly want you to believe it’s possible. They tell you not to worry about climate change because “humans have always adapted,” Texas climate scientist Andrew Dessler writes. However, “adaptation, far from being an easy way out, is shaping up to be an absolute nightmare."
While some level of adaptation is absolutely required — climate change is, unfortunately, here to stay — the notion that it should be our front-line response is flawed at its core," Dessler argues. "Relying on adaptation as a primary strategy is a recipe for widespread misery and conflict.
We agree; it’s folly to imagine we can adapt our way through a planetary emergency while doing nothing to halt it. But dangerous impacts are already here and are already hurting people.
It's not an either/or.
As climate educators invested in justice, we want to give fellows the tools to understand why adaptation is necessary, why it’s incomplete on its own, and why it's a justice issue. Thus we decided to move the class forward; it now appears about halfway through the course, with a hefty dose of context.
Sadly, adaptation feels especially timely lately. The international hit movie Flow, which emotionally depicts why adapting to threats like rising waters will hinge on community, won an Oscar in March. And U.S. leaders appear set on undermining the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Though far from perfect, FEMA has been a critical tool for helping people recover after hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme events worsened by climate change.
We know the need for help facing such disasters is increasing. It’s not too soon to start learning what’s possible—and preparing to build something better.