Young and vulnerable will keep fighting for a safe climate

The deep complexities of climate change raise a myriad of challenges for humanity – not least of which is how best to respond. Should we throw ourselves into slashing carbon emissions and stabilising Earth’s climate as soon as possible? Or accept our fate and go into survival mode?

A recently published book tackles this question. In Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet, public ethicist Clive Hamilton and energy expert George Wilkenfeld urge Australia to get serious about climate adaptation.

Many of the pair’s arguments make perfect sense. The path to decarbonisation is challenging, and progress has been far too slow. And of course, the world has already heated far too much and more damage is already locked in – so adapting is vital.

However, I disagree with the central thesis of the book: that humanity cannot adapt adequately to climate change if we keep trying so hard to reduce emissions. This is not an either-or proposition: we must do both.

Climate mitigation refers to efforts to reduce the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Adaptation involves adjusting our lives to cope with life on a hotter planet – such as higher seas and more extreme weather.

Much of Living Hot is devoted to outlining the barriers and limits to Australia’s mitigation task.

I agree with some of the authors’ analysis. Efforts to capture carbon and store it underground are an ineffective distraction. And some emissions-reduction activities can damage the environment, such as mining critical minerals and building renewable energy infrastructure.

However, I find other parts of the book problematic.

Hamilton and Wilkenfeld argue that hopes of returning to a safe climate are “wishful thinking”. They say Australia has been too slow on climate action and has wasted its chance of becoming a renewable energy superpower. They believe attempts to “electrify everything” – replacing our coal- and gas-powered economy with renewable energy, and electric vehicles and appliances – will likely fail.

Overall, the pair believe while Australia should still strive to meet its international obligations to reduce emissions, our primary focus should now be on planning to live on an overheated planet. Or in their words: “our only choice now is to focus on adaptation”.

I have several issues with this argument. First, it’s broadly accepted in the academic literature that reducing emissions is vital if adaptation is to be successful. As the old adage goes, prevention is better than cure.

It stands to reason that the hotter the planet, the harder adaptation becomes.

Second, Hamilton and Wilkenfeld devote a large portion of the book to outlining the problems with mitigation, but apply a far less critical lens to the many barriers and limits to adaptation.

Transforming society to adapt to climate change will be no easy task. The book does note some complexities involved in, say, retrofitting homes to make them more resilient to disasters, or relocating flood-prone communities. It touches on the futility of building river levees and seawalls, and the general challenges of building community consensus for change.

But to me, this part of the analysis feels underdone. Exactly how will we get Australians on board with adaptation actions such as pre-emptively relocating entire regions, when we have barely embraced far easier changes, such as eating less meat?

Hamilton and Wilkenfeld argue the challenges inherent in mitigation – such as cost and political resistance, or our slowness to act – are essentially now insurmountable. Yet this same logic is not applied to the adaptation discussion.

All this leaves me wondering why Hamilton and Wilkenfeld didn’t argue for a two-pronged approach: full-throttle emissions reduction coupled with transformative adaptation.

Hamilton himself has done much in the past to raise public awareness of the need to heed the science and cut emissions. By approaching mitigation and adaptation hand-in-hand, we could harness community concern about climate change to kickstart and bolster adaptation actions.

Australians are increasingly climate-literate. It seems far-fetched to imagine people would accept the argument that mitigation has essentially failed and we must now accept catastrophic heating.

At the end of Living Hot, Hamilton and Wilkenfeld discuss the “personal oddesey” of researching and writing the book. They write:

Making ourselves peer into the abyss of an Australian society struggling to cope with an unending series of extreme events meant reconfiguring our picture of what the future will be like.

I get it. The grief is real, the terror is real. In fact, I’ve written a book about it.

Yet I disagree when Hamilton and Wilkenfeld write it is “natural to be despondent when thinking about climate change”.

Yes, feeling disillusioned about climate crisis is common, and valid. So too is feeling overwhelmed, cynical, horrified, depressed, confused, isolated or angry.

But as my research has shown, feelings of climate distress are not “natural”. They arise from emotional violence inflicted on us by political systems that know a public that feels disillusioned, overwhelmed and burnt-out is less likely to fight the expansion of fossil-fuelled capitalism.

And not everyone feels the same way about the climate crisis. For example, men and women experience it very differently.

And those of us insulated from climate impacts, such as older, white people living in affluent nations, might be less inclined to act.

Others do not have this luxury. Those on the frontlines of the climate crisis – young people, Pacific Islanders, disaster survivors, First Nations peoples, and others vulnerable to climate change – cannot give up. Many already live with the catastrophic impacts of global warming, or will still be alive when the worst effects are felt. They do not call for us to lower our mitigation ambitions. They keep fighting.

As part of a recent collaborative research project, I spoke to wildlife carers about their efforts to care for animals during the Black Summer bushfires. These people went to extreme lengths – compromising their finances, physical and mental health – to save or care for as many animals as they could.

Of course, the number of animals they were able to save pales in comparison to three billion displaced or incinerated. Still, these people didn’t quit.

It’s in these acts of perseverance, in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, where we can truly find hope.

Dr Blanche Verlie is a Sydney Horizon Fellow and multidisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on climate change. Her research investigates how people understand, experience, and respond to climate change. This story was first published on The Conversation. Hero photo: Those on the frontlines of the climate crisis must keep fighting for emissions reduction, Dan Himbrechts/AAP.