Adaptation and Resilience in the Face of Climate Change

In recent years, inflation-adjusted incomes have slumped in Canada, accompanied by a stagnation in productivity.

Since the sweltering summer of 1988, when climate change first erupted as a global policy concern, there have been two broad categories of public policies proposed to manage the risks of climate change: mitigation—heading off potential risks by attempting to control greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere; and adaptation, which focuses on using conventional engineering technologies and other risk-management systems to prevent imminent harms at a more local level.

Early theoretical work, particularly by political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, showed that under conditions of deep uncertainty—where risks are difficult to predict or quantify—resilience-based strategies like adaptation out-perform anticipatory efforts like mitigation.

However, as developed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and later led by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), policy attention quickly congealed around mitigation, while adaptation was given little more than lip service.

For Canada, an early and aggressive supporter of the IPCC’s globalist mitigation agenda, this focus led to massive spending of taxpayers’ money on fanciful technologies, increased regulations, stifled key industries, and discouraged efforts to enhance Canadians’ ability to adapt to harmful climate events.

All of this has unfolded in a world where Canada’s potential to head off climate risks through domestic GHG mitigation is essentially nil. Canada contributes only about 1.45% of global emissions and had already transitioned to low-carbon electricity by the late 1980s, having picked the “low-hanging fruit” early.

Even full elimination of Canada’s emissions would not influence global temperatures, nor would it increase Canada’s resilience and, in any case, Canada’s GHG reductions would quickly be replaced in the atmosphere—and more than replaced—by still rapidly growing greenhouse-gas emissions from China.

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