Forget Adapting to Climate Change

We Must First Adapt to the Climate We Have

By Patrick Brown

Climate change adaptation continues to receive increasing attention both in international and domestic contexts. In these discussions, we are continuously told that humanity was more-or-less sufficiently adapted to the historical climate, but now, the rapid and unprecedented rate of climate change is the primary motivation to invest in increased societal resilience to weather and climate hazards. We are also told that climate change adaptation is not going well, since the climate is changing much faster than we are adapting to it. 

Both of these points are seriously flawed. Humanity has never been close to sufficiently adapted to any climate. Our historical climate, far from being benign and nurturing, was indifferent and often hostile to our well-being, and this is why history is rife with examples of devastating climate impacts on society. 

At the same time, humanity has had tremendous success strengthening our defenses against the climate's inherent hostility faster than negative impacts from climate change have materialized. This climate adaptation (as opposed to climate change adaptation) is not a new phenomenon related to United Nations reports or initiatives of local governments. Rather, it is a continuation of humanity's inexorable impetus to reduce our vulnerability to our environment, driven largely by economic development and technological progress. 

Climate adaptation has a proven track record

The empirical evidence tells a very positive story on humanity’s increasing climate adaptation over time: almost all climate-sensitive aspects of society are trending in generally positive directions. We have observed higher crop yields, translating to more calories available per person, and a reduction in death rates from malnutrition and famines. Access to safe drinking water has increased, while the prevalence of climate-sensitive diseases like malaria has decreased. Furthermore, mortality rates due to extreme temperatures—both cold and heat—have declined, as have deaths from natural disasters.

Economic indicators reinforce this story. General economic measures like GDP per capita and the fraction of people in extreme poverty show major improvement over time as temperatures have risen, and even the economic impact of disasters, relative to GDP, has remained stable or decreasing.

To understand why these indicators are improving over time, we can look at the variation across space today. Notably, the differences between low and high-income countries are stark. Death rates from natural disasters like floods, droughts, and storms are 15 times higher for low-income countries than they are for high-income countries. Moreover, disaster damages as a percentage of exposed GDP are much lower in wealthier nations. Thus, more than anything else, general economic development is the critical factor in explaining the historical success of climate adaptation.

Why does adaptation have a bad reputation?

If the empirical evidence so strongly supports our increased resilience, why does adaptation have such a poor reputation as being ineffectual, a “lazy cop-out” as Al Gore put it, or even immoral? 

Culturally, there is a great deal of social capital tied to expressing concern about climate change and acknowledging the successes of resilience is associated with a lack of concern. Further impacting nature is seen as inherently morally wrong and inevitably self-destructive under traditional environmentalist frameworks. Thus, there is significant  social and moral motivation to view adaptation as potentially ineffective.

A more technical reason adaptation has a bad reputation comes from academic studies of its effectiveness, which underpin official reports and subsequent news headlines on the subject. These studies often find adaptation to be relatively ineffectual due to a narrow definition that focuses on climate change adaptation and excludes general climate adaptation. Specifically, adaptation tends to be defined to include only technologies or activities that are more beneficial in a changed climate than they are in an unchanged one. 

David B. Lobell’s “Climate Change Adaptation in Crop Production” argues that if technology increases crop yields equally in the current and future climates, it cannot be considered an adaptation to climate change. Instead, only the additional benefits in the future climate (not the overall benefit of the technology) should be counted towards the technology's climate adaptation benefits. 

This is a valid technical point to make in an academic paper or a textbook, but it has limited practical use. As a society, should we really care to distinguish between technologies and behaviors that are “true” climate change adaptations compared to those that generally fortify society against all climates? I don't think so. 

However, this technical distinction has escaped the confines of scholarly academic journals and underlies general public sentiments about the ineffectiveness of climate change adaptation. For example, this narrow definition of adaptation supports the IPCC's assertion that adaptation in crop production will be insufficient to offset the negative effects of climate change (despite the mentioned general increases in crop yields over time as it has gotten warmer). It is also used through a chain of citations in the recent federal government’s increase in the social cost of carbon by 300%, which is our formal all-encompassing number for the impact of climate change. 

This definitional obscurantism elides the true effectiveness of climate adaptation, but we could still be much more adapted to our climate's perils.

Most of the motivation to accelerate climate adaptation is independent of climate change.

Societies around the world are better climate-adapted than ever, but you’d only need to open a news site on any given day to see that we have a long way to go. Consider that in the current climate, approximately 20 million people globally (one in every 400 people on Earth) are forced to move due to weather-related disasters each year, and domestically, we see over 20 “Billion dollar disasters” per year.

These and other climate impacts are captured by a body of literature demonstrating substantial economic impacts from weather variability in the historical record. If we were truly adapted to our climate, the economy would be insulated from the environment, and we would have no forced displacement, no billion-dollar disasters, and no observable relationships between weather and economic outcomes.

Activists would have you believe that all of this sensitivity to the climate is new and a result of climate change, but the data and our physical understanding of the climate system tell a different story. Natural, unforced variability significantly overshadows the climate change signal on planning timescales of about 30 years and local spatial scales. Climate is what you expect, and weather is what you get, but the weather that we get on these spatiotemporal scales is much more determined by the random roll of the atmospheric dice than by how much greenhouse gasses we emit or how much those gasses warm the global climate. Examining various weather and climate hazards individually makes this point more explicit. 

• There is no coherent trend in global floods (quantified with annual maximum streamflow), and projected changes are relatively small. 

• There is no coherent trend in global droughts (quantified with consecutive dry days), and projected changes are relatively small. 

• There is no trend in global hurricane activity (quantified with Accumulated Cyclone Energy), and projected changes are small. 

• There is no documented trend in US tornado and hail activity, and projected changes are relatively small. 

• Global wildfire activity shows a downward trend, and future projections are highly uncertain and depend very much on human land use and land management. 

Do the above facts tell us that we are sufficiently adapted to these hazards and, thus, don't need to concern ourselves with further reducing our vulnerability to them? Of course not! All of these hazards are extremely detrimental to human life and property, and we should ensure that we maintain or accelerate fortification against them.

Moreover, some hazard trends are moving unequivocally in the benign direction, such as the historical and projected decrease in extreme cold. But again, does this mean we need not worry about extreme cold? Cold-related deaths far outnumber heat-related deaths, and events like the 2021 Texas power crisis demonstrate far-reaching societal vulnerabilities. The signal from climate change is simply not large enough to allow society to relax our defenses against extreme cold.

The main exceptions—where explicit consideration of adapting to a new warmer climate is warranted—are coastal flooding (sea level rise) and extreme heat. In these situations, the signal-to-noise ratio is much larger, and thus, fortification against these hazards will be aided by explicitly anticipating their intensification in the future.

How to maintain and accelerate climate adaptation

So, what is the best way to maintain and accelerate global climate adaptation? There are many strategies specific to each weather or climate hazard. 

For extreme temperatures, these adaptations include: widespread well-insulated buildings with heating and air conditioning, a reliable energy grid able to handle increased energy demand during extreme temperatures, energy prices that are low so that heating and air conditioning are not prohibitively expensive, and automation of outdoor labor activities (e.g., mechanization of agriculture) so a larger fraction of the population works inside. 

For floods, these include: flood control systems (dikes, dams, and levees), capable stormwater drainage systems, zoning regulations to reduce building in floodplains, and properly priced insurance so that risk is accurately reflected.

For droughts, these include: building or expanding reservoirs, dams, or other water storage systems, researching and developing drought and heat-resistant crops, using water-efficient irrigation (precision agriculture), and investing in desalination technology. 

For major storms like hurricanes, these include: skillful forecasts and dissemination of information on preparation and evacuation, well-paved roads, a population with easy access to transportation so that evacuation is practical, and implementing building construction codes that ensure a minimum level of resiliency. 

For wildfires, these include: disseminating weather predictions and warnings that discourage activities that ignite fires, large-scale hazardous fuel reduction treatments, constructing firebreaks near communities, promoting fire-safe properties, implementing building construction codes that reduce the flammability of structures, well-funded and equipped firefighting systems with sufficient staff and resources like helicopters and bulldozers, and properly priced insurance that accurately reflects risk.

For all hazards, accurate weather forecasts and the efficient dissemination of warnings is paramount and incredibly valuable. But again, these were not developed explicitly to adapt to climate change but rather to increase our general resilience to our hostile climate. 

So, do we need a top-down global program to dictate the above measures? One way to think about this is to consider historical differential outcomes, like those related to food security. For example, a recent study estimates that the effect of historical climate change on food insecurity is much smaller than the difference in food insecurity across regions. Specifically, they showed that climate change has increased food insecurity by about 3% in all the regions they investigated but that the difference between Africa (50%) and Europe (13%) was 37%. There is also the finding mentioned above that death rates from natural disasters are 15 times higher for low-income countries than they are for high-income countries.

Now ask, is the relatively low amount of food insecurity and natural disaster death rates in higher-income regions due to some grand central program for climate change adaptation initiated in these countries many decades ago, or is success simply a reflection of overall societal wealth? It is primarily the latter. 

Thus, reducing energy poverty and advocating for growth are key to accelerating general climate adaptation on a global scale. More specifically, this means embracing public investments in the foundational aspects of economies: energy, transport, communication infrastructure, health, and education, and encouraging the private sector with business-friendly policies that attract foreign direct investment and facilitate entrepreneurship. Private property rights and fair market competition (i.e., capitalism) promote resource efficiency and innovation. Wealth liberates human mental and physical energy, enabling billions of microdecisions to respond more effectively to local environmental and market signals, thereby accelerating climate adaptation.

A wealthy, technologically advanced society is one in which you are informed via a variety of media sources of an approaching hurricane days in advance. You can then use your SUV to attain and install hurricane shutters (or have Amazon deliver them) on your already sturdily built, up-to-advanced-code home, and can subsequently use that SUV to evacuate to an affordable hotel on safer ground. After the storm, disaster response teams have cleared the roads, and you can return safely to the area with electricity restored and air conditioning running in a matter of days. 

Even projects that are almost certainly in the dominant purview of governments, like the building of major sea wall systems, require a wealthy tax base to fund those projects. For example, high-income countries like the US have the tax base to include climate adaptation measures in laws like the recent 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2023 Inflation Reduction Act, which assigned $7 billion to FEMA to help communities proactively reduce their vulnerability to floods, hurricanes, drought, wildfires, extreme heat; $7 billion to The Army Corps for projects related to coastal storm risk management, hurricane and storm damage reduction, inland flood risk management, and aquatic ecosystem restoration; and $12.3 billion to the Department of the Interior for drought resilience. 

Overall, the climate being indifferent to our well-being and often hostile to it is the natural state of affairs, and this is why the past and the present are rife with examples of devastating climate impacts on society. What is unnatural—and good—is our relatively recent and continuing fortification against our often hostile climate. 

Embracing established paths of success for general climate adaptation is the headline, and adapting to climate change is the sideshow. Climate-sensitive societal outcomes are predominantly determined by societal wealth, and that wealth is still tied to greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, in order to accelerate climate adaptation, general economic development should be prioritized overrestrictive energy policies that insist that a carbon budget is near-to-be or has already been breached.