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Preparing for
a Different Future: Adaptation
Responses to global climate change can be grouped
into two broad categories: Adaptation and Mitigation.
Adaptation involves developing ways to help people
and places be less vulnerable to climate impacts.
Examples include building seawalls to protect against
enhanced storm flooding and relocating structures
to higher ground. Mitigation involves slowing the
process of global climate change by lowering the
amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, through
such mechanisms as reducing greenhouse gas emissions
from office buildings, lowering energy demand, and
planting trees that absorb carbon dioxide from the
air and store it in their trunks, roots, and soil.
In this section we examine what people currently
are doing or could do in the future to adapt to climate
change. Information on what public institutions within
and outside the region are doing to prepare for a
changing climate is presented. We also describe what
private companies in the Region are doing to prepare
for climate change. How individuals in the Region
can respond and adapt to climate change impacts is
discussed. Where possible, the costs of adapting
to global climate change are presented as well.
Mitigation is addressed in the section titled “Limiting
Future Climate Change: Mitigation”
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- What are
public agencies in the region doing to develop
adaptations to a changing climate?
- What is being done in other major urban areas
to adapt to climate change?
- What role can the private sector play in adapting to climate change?
- What can
individuals in the region do in response to climate
change?
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