ONE of the most challenging issues boggling the mind may not be the term climate change itself, but rather what is meant by climate change adaptation and mitigation.
GUEST OPINION: PETER MAKWANYA
As such, there is so much misfiring, half-truths, redundancies, wild guesses and near-misses, which have only helped to exercabate climate illiteracy, as well as climate poverty through either mistaking one of these terms for the other, by erroneously explaining adaptation as mitigation or mitigation as adaptation or both.
The words may appear similar and are erronously interchanged and this presents a challenge of substitution rather than of omission.
In simple terms, adaptation means the responsive adjustment to an to an environmental condition, mitigation can also include steps taken to lessen the impact of climate change.
Adaptation is aimed at long term impact and would, therefore, afford greater chances or opportunities for protection to the communities over a long period of time.
But what contributes to a procedural error is that, within the process of adaptation itself, there appear to be mitigatory initiatives aimed at weakening the effects of climate change.
If a community plans to mitigate against floods, they will obviously build on high ground or migrate to a safer place and only return when the situation normalises.
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Another mitigatory measure is to train communities in countering effects of climate change with appropriate and sustainable knowledge to use in the event that those situations arise. These are life-saving skills that respective communities would need for climate protection purposes.
Adaptation also assists in reducing levels of vulnerabilities of the local people and local ecosystems to climate change in order to minimise adverse effects of natural disasters. When communities adopt drought resistant crop varieties like sorghum, rapoko or millet or insuring their crops, this is adaptation.
Mitigation is aimed at reducing the intensity of climate change impacts. When interventions to lower the concentration of greenhouse gases are made and realised.
Other mitigatory measures may include efforts to reduce emissions an steps taken to avoid deforestation.
Programmes such as carbon capture or storage, as well as forest regeneration are an adaptative approach, as these have long term sustainable effects. The point of adaptation, whose benefits should increase over time, is to avoid damage to the infrastructure.
Mitigation efforts can also help foster adaptative capacities, while adaptation enables a system or interventions to adjust to climate change scenarios in order to enhance resilience.
Every country should ensure that it has invested a lot in fostering sustainable resilient solutions for climate protection. If a country has sound resilient policies then it becomes cushioned against occasional climate shocks.
This can also assist the nation in maintaining, not only sustainable climate protection, but food security as well. In achieving food security status, the nation would be able to reduce and manage the vulnerability status of its people.
Mitigation activities are aimed at removing pending climate blocks and barriers, as well as addressing causes of climate change, while adaptation activities are aimed at addressing impacts of climate change on a long term basis.
The differences between adaptation and mitigation are quite subtle, as these are related terms.
What should be crystal clear is that adaptation and mitigation are not just semantics, but are strategies for addressing climate change.
The differences betweem adaptation and mitigation to climate change may be in the roles that they play. Finally, while mitigation addresses causes of climate change, adaptation addresses impacts of climate change. Because these two critical terms can strongly influence each other, it is, therefore, important to integrate them in order to come up with sustainable climate solutions.
Peter Makwanya is a Climate change communicator. He writes in his capacity and can be contacted on: [email protected]
