Climate change can be seen as a classic problem in public policy given the levels of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity … Hence climate change risks and public and private responses to them are unstructured in the sense that relevant norms, processes, and facts are contested. (Huitema et al. 2016, p. 37)
Climate change is a global, disrupting and transformational agent with broad implications for society, managed ecosystems and the natural world (IPCC 1990, 2001, 2007, 2014). Biodiversity loss, already high due to human influences, will be further accelerated by climate change. The range of much valuable flora and fauna will be reduced, as will the diversity of species. Threats to human health will increase with anthropogenic climate change through disruptions to food production, extreme heat and degraded air quality in densely populated cities, increases in vector-borne diseases and other factors. Sea level rise, combined with other elements involved in coastal flooding, threatens the lives and wellbeing of millions of people living on the coastal deltas, especially in Bangladesh, China, Egypt and India. Although these and other impacts will accumulatively impose great costs, there are measures to reduce vulnerabilities, build capacities, plan, prepare and support adaptation measures. Societies and communities around the world are now embarking on a project to prepare for the impacts of climate change and to respond after its impacts are realised. At the same time, uncertainty is prevalent as ‘… we do not know and cannot know exactly what changes – including thresholds and feedbacks – are in motion’ (Nightingale et al. 2019, p. 1). It follows that the central questions for climate change adaptation include: Who will make the key adaptation decisions? How will these decisions be made? Who will suffer the losses from climate change? Who will reap the benefits? Accordingly, adapting to climate change involves social agents in distributing the resultant costs and benefits. Society is impacted by a changed climate but society is by no means in a static state. In many ways anthropogenic climate change is a direct result of the development of the modern industrialised society (IPCC 2014). In addition, in parallel with a changing climate, contemporary society is developing in ways that influence vulnerabilities, events impacts, capacities to act and the pathways for future action and decisions (Moloney et al. 2018a). This is further complicated by the array of inconsistencies, multiplicity of meanings and ambiguities that surrounds climate change and related policymaking and governance (Bulkeley 2016). The dynamic of climate change, a changing society, and policymaking and governance involves great challenges and entails comprehensive threats to society.
Responding to these comprehensive threats requires coordinated action at all levels and including all spheres of society and involves ‘… more than just minor adjustments at the policy scale’ (Moloney et al. 2018b, p. 5). These actions include both efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to keep the rate of future global warming as low as possible (i.e., mitigation), as well as efforts to counteract the climate change impacts already extant, in the short and in the long term, by assessing risks, preparing for and responding to these impacts (i.e., adaptation). For clarity, in this volume ‘adaptation’ refers to social responses to actual or anticipated climate change impacts and not to adaptation in the natural world.
From one perspective, mitigation and adaptation pose different challenges for policy design and intervention (Schipper 2006; Granberg and Elander 2007; Biesbrok et al. 2009; Pielke 2009). One key difference between climate change mitigation and adaptation is the stronger role of government, especially central government, in mitigation policies (Head 2014). This is a result of the need for authoritative enforcement of standards ‘… to target and reduce the several major known sources of GHG emissions’ (Head 2014, p. 664). Mitigation effectiveness is independent of place, as it does not matter where the emissions originate, or where the mitigation takes place, as it is the global cumulative effect that is in focus. Adaptation, in contrast, is often considered as a place-based activity focusing on climate-related local and regional impacts, such as extreme weather events, heatwaves and droughts, changing rainfall patterns and sea level rise (Agrawal et al. 2009; Farber 2013; Moloney et al. 2018a; Granberg et al. 2019).
From another perspective, this dichotomous view can be problematized as both mitigation and adaptation are collective action problems lacking clearly identifiable responsibilities (Keskitalo et al. 2016). This highlights the need for involving public actors in ways that also involves steering and coordinating businesses, NGOs, organized interests and individual citizens (Bulkeley 2016; Morrison et al. 2017; Moloney et al. 2018a).
Avoiding ongoing global warming exceeding two degrees Celsius, global GHG emissions must be cut by one-half within 12 years and essentially eliminated by 2050; at the current rate of warming, a 1.5°...