Michael D. Mastrandrea and Stephen H. Schneider, both of Stanford and the IPCC, in an article titled “The Rising Tide” in the current issue of The Boston Review argue that adaptation now needs to be part of the discussion of climate change:

Mitigation, however, will not suffice. Even with aggressive global efforts to reduce emissions, the Earth’s climate will continue to change significantly for many decades because of the magnitude of past emissions and the inertia of social and physical systems. Of course, many uncertainties remain about how best to reduce emissions and how the climate system will respond. But we can now say with confidence that rapid climate change and its impacts are at hand. As a result, we face immediate choices about how to temper its worst consequences for vulnerable populations and regions.

Alongside mitigation, then, we also need policies focused on adaptation, on making sensible adjustments in the face of unavoidable changes.

If these arguments sound familiar around here, they are, as we’ve been arguing them for more than 10 years. Here is an abstract from a 1998 paper of mine (PDF):

Since the late 1980s, scientists and policy makers have devoted considerable attention and resources to the issue of global climate change. Domestic and international policies in response focus primarily on prevention of future climate impacts on society through the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions. Academic and political attention is also largely focused on issues of mitigation. Adaptation refers to adjustments in individual, group, and institutional behavior in order to reduce society’s vulnerabilities to climate, and thus reduce its impacts. In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote that adaptation offers a ‘very powerful option’ for responding to climate change and ought to be viewed as a ‘complement’ to mitigation efforts. Yet, the IPCC also wrote that ‘little attention has been paid to any possible tradeoff between both types of options’. This paper discusses the limitations of mitigation responses and the need for adaptation to occupy a larger role in climate policy.

Dan Sarewitz and I even made the case for adaptation in a piece titled, coincidentally, “Rising Tide (PDF)“. Adaptation is now cool.