Climate change strategies turning from abating towards adapting

With global carbon dioxide levels reaching a dreaded milestone last month, and the average global temperature still on the rise, it seems that government policies are now starting to fall back on plans to adapt to the effects of climate change, rather than just focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Just last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a report called A Stronger, More Resilient New York, that outlined a plan to strengthen the city's infrastructure to deal with the effects of climate change.

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"Six years ago, PlaNYC sounded the alarm about the dangers our city faces due to the effects of climate change and we've done a lot to attack the causes of climate change and make our city less vulnerable to its possible effects," said Mayor Bloomberg in a statement. "But Hurricane Sandy made it all too clear that, no matter how far we've come, we still face real, immediate threats. These concrete recommendations for how to confront the risks we face will build a stronger more resilient New York. This plan is incredibly ambitious — and much of the work will extend far beyond the next 200 days — but we refused to pass the responsibility for creating a plan onto the next administration. This is urgent work, and it must begin now."

The report that Mayor Bloomberg refers to was published back in 2007, at a time the U.N. Foundation put out a report called Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable, and the Canadian government released a report of its own in the same year: From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate.

These reports all emphasize that we should be thinking about what effects climate change will have on our environment. For Canada, this will mean stronger storms and hurricanes, potentially more hurricanes impacting on the Atlantic provinces, rising ocean levels and subsequent coastal flooding, but also heat waves and drought, lower lake and river levels, changes in the availability of drinking water. It will also mean a longer growing season, which could be an economic boon for the country, but at the same time, defrosting permafrost in the north is expected to release tons of trapped greenhouse gases, driving climate change farther and faster. Adapting to these changes and stresses will require us to change how we run our cities, how we manage our resources, and how we live our day to day lives.

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However, while this does represent a shift in focus, it doesn't mean that we've given up on curbing emissions, or even that we should give up. It's simply an acknowledgement that, until we can make lasting changes to the amount of carbon dioxide we're releasing into the atmosphere, we can't ignore the effects that climate change is having on the world, and that we are going to have to make changes to the way we live our lives in order to survive those effects.

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