The Role of "Super-adaptation" in the Climate Crisis

As the global conversation on responses to climate change begins to shift from mitigation to adaptation, it is time to consider various forms of adaptive response with foresight
Published in Social Sciences and Sustainability
The Role of "Super-adaptation" in the Climate Crisis
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A couple of years ago, on a visit to the anthropology museum at the University of Queensland, Australia, I walked through a small exhibition on “The Anthropocene''. This was before the controversial pronouncement by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that such a delineation was an “event” rather than an “epoch.” The exhibition did not engage in debating the term’s applicability and instead of lamenting a “conquest of nature”, the curators concentrated on how our ancestors adapted to major ecological changes. The introductory statement read:

Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans have experimented with an extraordinary array of subsistence practices, economies and socio-political systems. One of the defining features of our species is our ability to access information about these earlier lifeways, and to learn from our past.  

This statement prompted me to wonder how we might similarly use these lessons from the past for coping with planetary change – nature-based solutions adopted by our ancestors during civilizational inflection points to adapt to their changing world.  For example, lead levels in Alpine ice core samples give us specific data about industrial practices at the time such as smelting of key metals. When we map this data into anthropological evidence about migrations during the Ice Age, we see corridors of human mobility that are linked to climate disruptions. Along these corridors one finds architectural innovations like felted tents with ventilation chimneys or subterranean cave dwellings for cooler habitation.  Analyzing complex urban societies and their relationship to nature can give us a sense of the warmer world that awaits us and highlight what we can do to prepare for it now.

Soon after the visit to the exhibition in Australia, I attended the Climate Change Summit (COP28) which took place in the mild winter of 2023 in Dubai. Despite exhortations from the host government, there was a hesitation to move towards adaptive solutions to climate change because of the “moral hazard” problem – the worry that social and technical strategies might lead to complacency and backsliding on reducing carbon emissions.  But there are good arguments for the need for greater adaptation. Steve Koonin, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has outlined four reasons for why adaptation should be our priority response in responding to climate change: 1) adaptation is agnostic – it does not make a value judgment on what caused the change and hence easier to sell politically; 2) adaptation is proportional – modest initial measures can be bolstered as climate change worsens; 3) adaptation is local – it can be tailored to specific cultural norms and tolerance for risk; 4) adaptation is effective – the range of human habitation over millennia from polar to tropical climates suggests our species has the genetic wherewithal to adapt.

A different kind of “deep adaptation” comes from Jem Bendell. He uses the allegory of Atlas the Titan carrying the weight of a cosmic destiny and gives it an ecological twist. Implicit in the Atlas myth is that humanity needs to strive to thrive. He is not fatalistic about our future. Rather, he recognizes that we will go through a series of crises and “breaking together” towards a new form of grassroots adaptation would be our path to restrained prosperity.

Although they begin from radically different starting points, Koonin and Bendell both move towards adaptation due to concerns about “groupthink” that can hinder technical innovations and social innovations. According to Bendell, the mantra of adaptation provides “constructive anarchism– in other words, adaptation can still be orchestrated by governments, but for it to be most effective, there needs to be flexibility to operationalize innovation at the level of the individual.

However, my definition of adaptation is broader than what is often construed in climate circles because of my training in environmental systems science. Adaptation is not merely a way of molding oneself to a new environment. Rather it is active engagement with the new environment’s features that can provide opportunities for charting a new development path which had previously not been possible. So for example, having no permafrost may cause initial architectural disruptions and methane release but ultimately may provide far more arable land which in turn could also be used as a carbon synch as well as for developing a flourishing agricultural economy

This is what I call “super-adaptation.” The term is congruent with the use of the prefix “super” to define what transcends the status quo and is additional to maintaining a steady state. Super-adaptation involves considering alternative futures that might not have been possible before and hence provides more pathways for not just surviving but thriving.

Figure 1: "Super-adaptation" in contrast with conventional /diagnostic and deep adaptation forms

Whether at the individual level or the collective level, climate change will jolt us into action—for better and for worse. Whether we react to this convulsive moment with pessimism or optimism will define our future at a civilizational level. For too long the conversation around climate change has been divided between mitigation of emissions versus adaptation to maintain the status quo or “cope with change.” This is more akin to "acclimating" or "adjusting." There is a third pathway as well, which is to identify key opportunities in the crisis that may arise for specific geographies and capabilities of human endeavor. Learning from the lessons of past cataclysms, we can forecast what the realities of a warmer world are likely to be and evolve intentionally toward it. It’s a quest for finding novel solutions and responses, rather than lamenting what we can no longer change.

This is more than just about “resilience” which has also been studied at length—instead, it is about how we chart our way through new paths of human development and opportunities that will be created while other trajectories are extinguished. Adapting to harness the opportunities of climate change may still be painful but can lead to new fortunes. While serving for four years on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility, my colleagues and I reviewed multimillion dollar projects for environmental restoration in developing countries. Communities in colder high-altitude climates began to consider the loss of glacial meltwater on the one hand, but also seeing the opportunity of longer growing seasons on the other. We had to move beyond lamenting the glacial melt and focus instead on finding water-harvesting methods that could enable residents to use the longer growing seasons more effectively. Canals were dug with subterranean cisterns and terraced irrigation was practiced for more efficient use of water. Amazonian communities restored degraded land with nutrient-rich soils called terra preta by incorporating biochar (partially burned and dehydrated organic material), animal manure, and food waste into degraded soils, improving fertility and microbial health.

Reminiscing on such approaches which our ancestors used with far fewer resources at their disposal, do not diminish the need to conserve or to mitigate emissions and consumption patterns, but they do realistically consider how we can make the most of a warming world. Having taught environmental studies to thousands of students over the past two decades, I am acutely familiar with the crosscurrents of the optimist-pessimist divide on climate change. Such an approach is also distinct from “eco-modernists” like Michael Shellenberger or Bjorn Lomborg who often disparage environmental activism. We do not need to be glib about the future or to dismiss the need for mitigating emissions or having less profligate lifestyles. Our aim instead should be to describe instances across the planet of the best pathways for harnessing the opportunities of the climate crisis from a systems perspective. This is neither "optimism" nor "pessimism", but a foresight form of opportunistic "pragmatism."

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