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MITIGATION OF, AND ADAPTATION TO, CLIMATE CHANGE AND SEA LEVEL RISE IMPACTS

The Mitigation and Adaptation repository synthesizes information on best and next practices in the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change and sea level rise impacts. For mitigation of climate change, see here.

This part of the repository aims to be a resource to those in need of mitigation and adaptation intelligence (MAI), and it will soon include blogs for the discussion of the next mitigation and adaptation practices (MAP).

Adaptation creates options to cope with changing conditions, both then changes that are occuring today and those that are expected to occure in the future. Adaptation also aims to create the resilience that allows a community to react in a timely manner to changes that were not anticipate.

Adaptation to climate change and its impacts can hardly work on an individual level down to households. Even at a local community level, adaptation is faced with many challenges that can only be addressed at a regional, national, or even international level.

Unfortunately, in many communities in the U.S., adaptation is still left to the individual households. An example is the raising of individual buildings to generate more freeboard as adaptation to local sea level rise. Without streets and neigbouring house being raised together, this can lead to the grotesk situation that a house is not being flooded but it cannot being accessed many times during a year because of the adjacent roads being flooded. An examples is discussed here.

In the U.S., disaster risk reduction related to hurricanes is to a large extent based on evacuation of population from areas where landfall is predicted. An alternative would be to develop a built environment that would allow people to stay during extreme events. One important option is to provide opportunities for vertical evacuation. Elevated floors above flood level and an infrastructure that can tolerate frequent flooding are crucial to ensure safety of those not evacuating. The approach taken by the City of Hamburg (see here) is an example of making communities resilient to flooding.

A statement often used to reject comprehensive adaptation is that nobody knows exactly what to expect. This is not correct. The relevant knowledge is in the PDFs of the future changes, and these PDFs are fairly well known. They can be applied to comprehensive risk assessments and as a basis for adaptation decisions.

In mitigation and adaptation discussion, the starting point is often to discuss the climate change hazard. An alternative approach to disaster risk reduction and resilience could start from the public serivices:

In addition to costs, it is important to consider quality of life, livelihood, and availability of services.