Heat waves, floods, storms and droughts caused by climate change are making life more difficult for people around the world. Societies will need to adapt to these changes, but governments, businesses and individuals will not be able to afford to protect themselves everywhere, nor will many people want to live with high levels of risk.
As I explain in my new book, Sink or swimwe face a series of difficult choices about how best to adapt to this new world. These choices include where we can live safely, who makes these decisions, and how we adapt the global food system to meet everyone’s needs in times of scarcity.
COP30 negotiators in Brazil later this month will focus on mobilizing finance to help low-income countries reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
At last year’s annual United Nations conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, governments agreed to mobilize at least $300 billion by 2035 and to target up to $1.3 trillion through public and private sources. But many high-income countries are not contributing their fair share, and UNEP estimates that the adaptation finance gap in low-income countries is between $187 billion and $359 billion a year.
More money is essential, but even a significant increase alone will not be enough to manage the risks the world faces. As I have found in my own work on adaptation with governments and civil society, adaptation efforts to date have often been limited and incremental. Measures such as early warning systems, cooling spaces and flood barriers are important and can help – for now. But this approach will not be enough to adapt to the impacts we face, such as heatwaves, floods, crop failures and potential ecosystem collapse, and we will need to answer the difficult questions that lie ahead.
One of those difficult choices will be when and how to move communities away from low-lying coasts. There are examples of planned resettlements in many places, including China, Fiji, India, Japan, the Philippines and the United States. But it’s really hard to do well. Residents of Wales have learned from local media that the sea defenses around their town will no longer be maintained in the future, but that many other places in the UK are under threat.
Governments will need to find ways to choose which places to defend in the face of sea level rise and flooding, and which places to retreat. In each of these sites we will need consultations to enable communities to identify what is important to them and government support to facilitate the movement of those who need to move.
Another difficult choice will be how to balance the diversity and productivity of the food system to ensure both sufficient resilience to withstand shocks and enough food to feed a growing global population. The food system is particularly vulnerable to climate change because it has very little diversity. Huge quantities of staple crops are grown in a few parts of the world and limited varieties dominate global consumption. A diverse system, with more built-in redundancy, would be more resilient, but difficult decisions lie ahead in implementing it, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and productivity.
Governments will need to invest in or subsidize more diverse food varieties, support local food systems and establish a wider range of trade relationships. This would lead to higher costs in the short term, but greater benefits in the long term in the event of shocks.
Making difficult decisions like these, as well as in areas such as migration, water use and biodiversity, will require high levels of public and private investment as well as trade-offs, compromises and short-term political costs.
But if we fail to address what needs to be done, we risk locking ourselves into the chaos of the climate crisis in perpetuity.
Susannah Fisher is the author of Sink or Swim: How the World Must Adapt to Climate Change
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