The Climate Majority Project
SAFER: Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience
Scoping Report
Rupert Read
Rosie Bell
“Adaptation remains the Cinderella of climate change, under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored”
- the Climate Change Committee.
Our thanks to community members for helping to shape this document at CMP’s Spring 2024 gathering, private and public meetings with Cadence Roundtable, and a dedicated Adaptation Residency at the Life Itself Hub in Bergerac. Thanks to Liam Kavanagh, Rachel Berger and Caroline Lucas for systematic comments, and to Nick Hajdu, Jamie Bristow, Rhiannon Raftery, Victor Anderson, Stanley Kohler and Rebecca Gibbs.
1. Why foreground adaptation? Background and rationale 12
1.2 Overcoming ‘soft denial’ 13
1.3 Adaptation as a catalyst for response to climate reality 16
1.4 Establishing the limits of adaptation 17
1.6 International precedent 19
1.7 Steering the adaptation narrative 19
1.9 Navigating collective action problems 22
3.1 Adaptation frames in brief 27
3.2 Locally focused and attuned 29
3.3 Foregrounding inner-outer resilience 30
3.4 Towards an adaptation-focused climate movement 31
4. Themes integrated in existing CMP and partner activities (UK) 32
5. Dedicated campaign activities 36
Appendix I: Some questions answered 45
Appendix II: Six modes of adaptation 48
Appendix III: Notes on terminology 50
Localised climate adaptation is:
Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) is a new UK-based campaign aiming to shift climate adaptation from the margins to the mainstream of climate advocacy, policy and action. It advocates for tangible, locally relevant measures that protect communities from coming climate impacts while galvanising public support for radical climate intervention. SAFER challenges the assumption within much climate activism, policy and diplomacy, that adaptation is a competitor to preventing climate impacts. Rather, adaptation can help accelerate decarbonisation, by offering a necessary depolarising on-ramp to social groups alienated from climate action. Accordingly, the campaign aims both to promote adaptation efforts, and to refocus campaigning energy in the climate movement to do the same.
1. Background and rationale: Why foreground adaptation?
In addition to the straightforward case for protecting communities in the age of climate consequences, insights from psychology and politics highlight adaptation as a critical but underexplored strategy to drive public climate engagement and accelerate action.
1.1 Protective necessity: In the UK, accelerating climate impacts present many severe risks to unprepared citizens and systems. Given the unpredictability of climate impacts, flexible resilience approaches are required that prepare for a range of scenarios.
1.2 Overcoming ‘soft denial’: Committing to adaptation means discarding the false optimism that current ‘mitigation’ measures will be sufficient to avert climate impacts, fostering a realistic public understanding of climate risks.
1.3 Adaptation as a catalyst for response to climate reality: Visible, concrete action to address local, tangible threats makes climate breakdown real for communities, bridging global issues with daily life.
1.4 Establishing the limits of adaptation: Serious national commitment to adaptation will quickly reveal its limits, strengthening the case for mitigation.
1.5 Broadening engagement: Climate action with a sole focus on decarbonisation has become prone to political polarisation, limiting public participation and engagement. Adaptation can engage marginalized groups and counter perceptions of climate action as elitist or irrelevant.
1.6 International precedent: The UK can not change the priorities of other nations unilaterally but its level of visibility may allow it to influence by example on adaptation action.
1.7 Steering the adaptation narrative: As impacts worsen and adaptation attracts mainstream attention, there is a growing risk that political opportunists and vested interests will co-opt the agenda in ways that undermine decarbonisation and exacerbate inequality. Climate advocates must lead in mainstreaming long-term, strategic resilience as an alternative to short-term, reactive, fragilising measures.
1.8 Co-benefits: Adaptation activity can improve quality of life, from home economic benefits to community cohesion - countering the social fragmentation and poor mental health that can drive unsustainable behaviour. Adaptation to preserve ecological health and strengthen social bonds supports antifragility; allowing communities to recover from shocks and find renewal.
1.9 Navigating collective action problems: Adaptation action does not suffer from the same profound collective action issues that inhibit global decarbonisation. While mitigation only works if billions of others join in, adaptation action directly benefits those who participate. Local collaboration in the face of a common threat can furthermore help strengthen collective identity. Supporting adaptation globally can help vulnerable regions remain habitable, reducing displacement pressures and potential social tensions.
2. Campaign Objectives
Integrated campaign objectives are mutually supportive:
3. Defining Adaptation
3.1 Adaptation frames in brief: Complex, integrated adaptation approaches are necessary to steer through worsening impacts and limit harm. A new frame, Strategic Adaptation[1] balances immediate damage control with long-term ecological protection and policy priorities. As damage worsens, it’s the task of SAFER to translate public demand for protection into a strong case for appropriate (rather than reactive) adaptation approaches.
3.2 Locally focused and attuned: In contrast to the high-level, global challenge of decarbonisation, adaptation requirements vary greatly according to local geography. Adaptation must be local, community-centered and tailored to specific regional needs - and in turn can naturally help build solidarity and bonds of community. Adaptation close to home is important to avoid derailment and maintain capacity to support more distant, vulnerable areas.
3.3 Foregrounding inner-outer resilience
4. Themes Integrated in existing activities
5. Dedicated campaign activities
Promoting adaptation; integrating resilience into policymaking and public discourse
Climate impacts
Extreme weather events such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires, and longer-term climatic changes such as increase or drop in local temperature, and the damage they cause to life supporting systems and structures (ecology, infrastructure, homes, health). Cascading impacts such as local and national crop failures, disruption of international supply chains, food and resource shortages, water fragility, business and economic disruption, health impacts, failure of societal systems, pressure upon social order.
Decarbonisation
Reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, with the aim to prevent further global overheating. Sometimes described as climate mitigation - though technically, mitigation is a border category than decarbonisation.
Local Climate Adaptation
Taking action to adapt and prepare for the broad, cascading impacts of human-triggered climate change. Protecting households, neighbourhoods, communities, infrastructure and resources through re-engineering and ‘ruggedisation’, ecological regeneration, inner resilience and more.
Detailed definitions of adaptation types follow in section 3.2.
Inner Resilience
In addition to ‘outer’ adaptation considerations named above, inner capacities, from emotional regulation to social cohesion and trust, are key to resilience in the face of climate impacts. Beyond individual ‘coping’ with impacts such as grief and anxiety, collective inner factors such as trust and belonging enhance material preparedness and recovery; and inner resilience is core to transforming adversity to beneficial outcomes. Inner-outer resilience names a holistic framework for climate adaptation: the integrated psychological, social, and material factors that enable individuals and communities to adapt to climate challenges. See also section 3.3.
Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) is a new campaign, hosted by the Climate Majority Project, aiming to shift climate adaptation from the margins to the centre of climate thinking, action and policy. SAFER promotes tangible, local adaptation measures as a protective and mobilising approach to climate breakdown. Unlike existing adaptation efforts focused on specific impacts, SAFER aims also to raise the general profile of adaptation, as a priority in global and local climate response; on a par with and fundamental to the case for decarbonisation. The campaign aims at a shift throughout the climate response field towards strategic adaptation as a primary, integrated approach. Far from deprioritising emissions reduction (‘either/or’), prioritising adaptation can unlock badly needed public support for serious climate measures (‘both/and’).
Beneficiary 1 (direct)
Unprepared communities whose homes, livelihoods and lives are at risk from climate damage in the short to medium term.
We have entered the age of climate consequences. Without far more, better and better-resourced adaptation quickly, untold numbers of people will suffer more, needlessly, from climate impacts. Here in the UK, initiatives for adaptation of communities, homes and infrastructure to the local effects of dangerous human-triggered climate change are beginning to emerge. However their scale and visibility is tiny compared to the urgent national (and global) need. They require increased scale, networking, and public amplification to drive engagement, understanding, support, and ultimately vast funding, innovation and replication.
Beneficiary 2 (bigger picture):
Everyone affected by climate breakdown, globally. Focus on adaptation can transform engagement with environmental issues and build a mandate for deep system transformation.
Climate is rightfully a popular issue, but fifty years of campaigning have not succeeded in galvanising the public support urgently necessary to drive decarbonisation. Adaptation is a powerful, underexplored route to widespread engagement with climate reality, with the potential to transform public engagement with the whole climate movement and policy space. High-level efforts towards decarbonisation remain vital, but can seem intangible and remote - even to communities who have already felt climate impacts. Adaptation is by definition focussed, local, concrete and tangible. It transforms climate breakdown from the status of a story or abstract belief to a lived (and shared) reality. As such it represents a powerful route to raise engagement with climate action among the majority. It likewise builds agency, dismantling the widely held view that ‘ordinary’ people are powerless in the face of a vast, complex crisis like climate breakdown.
Adaptation has potential to generate broad, tangible appeal, especially among those who feel alienated from the progressive climate movement. It can serve the needs of under-resourced, marginalised groups to whom the climate challenge has seemed far-away and low-priority. And it can appeal to other, more affluent disengaged groups who have yet to draw a connection between their own priorities and coming impacts.
Among less engaged groups, campaigning focused on empowering people to unite in protecting their homes and communities may be more accessible and less polarising[2] than ideas like ‘carbon footprint’, with potential to strengthen shared concern and collaboration both within and between communities.[3] The participation of these groups is completely necessary to build a mandate for adequate climate action across society: to mobilise the climate majority.
Avoiding confusion: adaptation does not mean abandoning decarbonisation
Currently, the vast majority of attention and resource in climate activism, policy and diplomacy is still dedicated to a ‘pure’ narrative of global decarbonisation. Calls for adaptation can attract criticism and concern that preparedness means giving up on prevention.[4] SAFER aims to challenge the ‘either / or’ assumption that adaptation must compete with prevention:[5]
1) Transformative Adaptation measures are holistic, actively integrating decarbonisation, ecosystem restoration and adaptation - for example flood and fire management through restoration of peatland and wetlands (see section 4).
2) Decarbonization requires democratic support that will not materialise until ‘climate change’ becomes a lived reality for communities - a process that can be greatly accelerated by adaptation.[6] Involving communities in the practical work of adaptation is a powerful route to coming to terms with the real dangers of the climate crisis. It can help to shift thinking about climate from a remote, invisible, abstract-seeming challenge to an urgent concrete, local challenge. Moreover in tackling this challenge practically, together, communities can reduce the overwhelm that might otherwise lead to denial.
Importantly then, SAFER advocates a shift in campaigning approach and focus, not in the fundamental aim of climate campaigning. More than ever, every fraction of a degree of overheating that can still be prevented is critical, with millions of lives, whole ecosystems and tipping points of irreparable harm hanging in the balance. Likewise it’s still true that nations in the global South will likely bear the brunt of harm soonest, despite the culpability of long-industrialised nations in the Global North. But it’s time to accept that complacent nations in the Global North are not immune to catastrophic damage. And that for this same reason, strategic adaptation close to home has a better chance of making the climate threat real to the UK’s voting public than any story we can tell about ‘global warming’. Global justice may likewise be better served by concrete adaptation focus: accepting the need for local adaptation will heighten the moral imperative for funding and supporting others to adapt.
“When actors perceive adaptation to and the risk of climate change as being within their powers to alter, they will be more likely to make the connection to the causes of climate change, thereby enhancing their mitigative, as well as adaptive, capacity”
- W. Neil Adger
Following an alarming surge in global temperatures in 2023-4, and a corresponding uptick in unnatural disasters including unprecedented flooding and devastating wildfires in 2024-25, a shift of campaigning attention towards climate impact resilience in the global north is timely. However, as yet, little climate NGO/movement activity focuses on building the case for adaptation. Change is emerging,[7] however - and this campaign aims to accelerate that change.
In the global North, awareness of the urgent need for adaptation is growing in the arena of climate diplomacy, and dawning in some areas of business and finance, as big money grows aware of risk to assets. Limited measures are being taken - mostly entirely behind the scenes - in government. Unsurprisingly, much leadership on transformative adaptation is arising out of the global South,[8] where countries on the front line of climate impacts have little alternative.[9]
Existing campaign work around adaptation is important but largely focused on specific policy objectives, for example the Glacier Trust. Currently we know of no other campaigns that aims at narrative shift towards adaptation framing within the wider climate movement, opening up new campaigning territory.
As a recent report by the Climate Change Committee has made explicit, Government efforts towards national adaptation measures in the UK are thoroughly inadequate,[10] with the recent (third) National Adaptation Programme falling far short of requirements. The report notes that "evidence of the UK's inadequate response to worsening climate impacts continues to mount", and "its key failure remains the absence of a credible vision for a well-adapted UK, resilient to the climate risks now facing British people and businesses."[11]
A supportive national policy framework is required to support the design, implementation and funding of locally appropriate adaptation. Areas of focus should include homes and infrastructure resilience (including renewable infrastructure); transformative approaches to drought, flood and fire risk; food, water and energy security; and psychological resilience.[12] [13]
Within both policy and advocacy fields, adaptation work and messaging must move beyond piecemeal, reactive structural repair and defence. To meet the grave challenges ahead, adaptation must urgently be redefined and delivered as a strategic, preventative, systems-focused intervention that supports social and ecological, as well as structural resilience.[14]
A wide range of interacting factors form the case for serious adaptation, and here we introduce a number of arguments which advocates may find useful depending on their context. From the psychology of public climate engagement at all levels of society to the political logic of our times, a range of insights support adaptation as a vital yet underexplored leverage point for many kinds of climate action.
A widespread assumption that countries like the UK are immune to severe climate disasters, even partial climate-driven collapse, is highly complacent. Climate consequences are already here in the UK, and they will get worse - with lack of preparation leaving citizens more vulnerable. Already, escalating flooding threatens homes, infrastructure and agriculture, as well as stressed water systems. Heatwaves and pollution threaten public health, affecting the vulnerable first and pressuring health services. Nor is the UK immune to climate damage felt abroad - from international supply chain disruption causing shortages, to economic shocks and cascading psycho-social issues. Localised adaptation measures of many kinds will be necessary to protect those most at risk - particularly but not limited to those most economically vulnerable.
Furthermore, thanks to nonlinearities inherent in climate breakdown, we can’t comprehensively predict what impacts we will face here in the UK, or what kind of adaptation they will require. We don’t yet even know whether we’re expecting a much hotter or a much colder climate. The latter is a distinct and growing risk: failure of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation[15] following massive Arctic ice-melt could trigger a temperature drop of up to 10°C. Future uncertainty is compounded by present uncertainty as to the speed and effectiveness of climate response. We don’t yet know whether to expect societal collapse at some scale - or in what timeframe.
As such, here in the UK and across the world, we will require not only adaptation to specific actual and expected impacts, but leadership approaches that are permanently adaptive. We must loosen cultural attachment to certainty and become more comfortable with not knowing - preferring flexibility, all-hazards precaution, and redundancies in our systems.[16]
Scientific consensus and public awareness of climate science has greatly shrunk the space of outright climate denial in public discourse. However a widespread disposition of soft denial[17] is maintained by a shared public assumption that leaders have climate decarbonisation in hand, and will produce the policy or the technology to rein in the threat just in time, without any need for system change.[18]
Over time, institutionally sanctioned climate decarbonisation targets have become enmeshed in this worsening situation. Since 2015 the preferred aim of multilateral climate policymaking has been to limit global overheating within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels - beyond which highly dangerous tipping points become more likely and climate chaos will escalate. Because the outcomes of overheating exceeding 1.5°C are known to be dire,[19] leaders have understandably considered their decarbonisation target both primary and sacrosanct. Accordingly however, despite rising emissions rendering the same target ever more unrealistic, the public narrative (we must and shall achieve 1.5°C) has not shifted - contributing gradually to a condition of widespread soft denial.
If we were still in any doubt, global temperatures throughout 2024 have shown clearly that climate decarbonisation is nowhere near on-target. Average global temperature increase has already for a whole year exceeded 1.5°C, shocking scientists. Evidence now strongly indicates that the world has crossed a deadly planetary boundary and is heading deep into the danger zone.
Communicating wilful optimism
Soft denial among the general public is further maintained by climate communicators promoting wilful optimism about climate mitigation.[20] This communications stance is often based on the belief that overly negative climate news will tip citizens into demotivating doomism and despair.[21] Most experts are well aware that the 1.5°C target is long gone and that current trajectories entail some degree of systems failure. However some still don’t feel able to say so thanks to consensus on optimistic communication. An institutional and media regime of wilful optimism is a powerful factor maintaining public silence around climate- (and collapse-) concern.[22] [23]
Because the subject of climate driven extreme chaos and collapse is still largely taboo, public conversation has not yet become widespread.[24] Widespread concern about ecologically driven collapse[25] therefore coexists with lack of awareness of how many others share this concern – a situation known as pluralistic ignorance. This is not to say that the public knows exactly how severe the threat is, but they certainly fear it is worse than they are told.
Denial maintains inaction
Not only is the hope of staying within the institutionally sanctioned 1.5°C limit now tragically unrealistic, but insisting otherwise actively undermines the decarbonisation and adaptation work that remains possible.[26] Soft denial fatally inhibits the public reaction that is badly needed to galvanise high-level response to climate breakdown.
Regarding decarbonisation, without public acknowledgement that current efforts are drastically insufficient, decision-makers and the voters they answer to will not experience sufficient pressure to multiply those efforts.
Regarding adaptation, the ongoing ‘safe’ fantasy of 1.5°C delays preparation for impacts and resilience building. To behave as if we don’t expect dramatic disruption to ecological and socio-political systems is extremely reckless.[27]
This matters most for those who will feel damage most acutely - primarily large populations in the global South, but also many less affluent inhabitants of the global North. Climate justice is no longer compatible with insisting that 1.5°C can still be achieved. Justice can only now be served through massive investment not only in decarbonisation, but crucially in adaptation, and compensation for loss and damage.[28]
At the CoP events, among the majority of NGOs, and in most ‘official’ seats of power including the business world, narratives of wilful optimism are still influential. However, signs of change are emerging: for example at CoP29 in Baku, evidence of a narrative shift became apparent with some delegates openly discussing the failure of the process. SAFER aims to accelerate this shift.[29]
Puncturing denial through adaptation
To motivate the action now needed, to summon the maximum energy available to work towards the best possible outcomes, leaders and citizens alike must acknowledge the true depth of the challenge.[30] Adaptation can provide a vital catalyst, by helping to dismantle the narratives maintaining denial. Adapting to potential and actual harm is incompatible with the belief that harm will be avoided, that climate breakdown will go away.[31] When it comes to puncturing pluralistic ignorance, emissions-reduction activity may be less important than adaptation. Adaptation tells us that others share our perception of tangible impacts.
1.3 Catalysing response to climate reality
Comprehension of threat and agency
Climate change is often discussed in abstract terms: rising CO₂ levels, distant temperature thresholds, and complex climate models. Some researchers suggest terms like ‘hyper-object’,[32] or a ‘diffuse object’[33] to explain the difficulty people sometimes have in grasping the tangible reality of climate breakdown. The idea of greenhouse gases, they point out, is beyond direct perception - distributed, gradual and invisible. No wonder, then, that a popular mandate has not emerged to support top-down decarbonisation initiatives - and that the climate movement has thus far struggled to recruit many active participants beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of activism.
While this account contains some explanatory value, it isn’t the whole story. In particular, it still implies the problematic information deficit model - the idea that given enough information (in this case, about the gravity of climate threat) people will take appropriate action.[34] In reality, even the ‘right’ kind of information is only part of the journey towards engagement and responsiveness on climate. We’ll suggest that adaptation can get us a lot further.
First, whether we’re talking about rising CO2 or towns submerged by flooding, reported information does not function in the same way as direct experience in persuading people that a given state of affairs is real. For the majority in wealthy countries where impacts still seem far away,[35] even the most scientifically robust climate warnings fail to generate sufficient urgency. Moreover the absence of visible, large-scale adaptation efforts reinforces the perception that climate threats are exaggerated. If these threats were as severe as scientists claim, the reasoning goes, governments would be acting. The fact that adaptation remains an afterthought signals—powerfully but implicitly—that the danger is not real enough to require immediate response. Conversely, witnessing pragmatic efforts to adapt within our own communities can persuade us of the reality we’re adapting to. Unlike decarbonisation, action centred upon adaptation is visible and concrete, anchoring reported global challenges in regional and local realities - thus highlighting connections between increasing local effects and their complex causes.[36]
Perhaps more importantly, adaptation has potential to create not only a stronger signal regarding climate reality, but a social context in which that signal can be received without creating the distress and overwhelm that leads many to deny or ignore it. People have many unconscious motivations for ignoring available facts — among them fear, and the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance we experience when new information contradicts our existing beliefs. Dozens of studies observe the overwhelm and disengagement that arises from frank discussion of climate realities. But they do not account for the possibility of supportive conditions that can mitigate distress, and allow the high stakes to motivate us.[37] By allowing us the chance to actively respond to the concrete climate threat within communities where we feel high co-concern, belonging and mutual support, adaptation helps to build the conditions necessary for a motivated climate response.
Four dimensions of climate action
Awareness about the reality at stake is, we argue, just one of four dimensions that must co-arise to mobilise serious climate action:
1. Available facts; basic comprehension of climate reality
Adaptation supplies physical evidence of the circumstances.
2. Access to meaningful climate action as a channel for the energies provoked by this knowledge.
The importance of action is widely acknowledged, but adaptation is vastly more effective as an outlet than the actions typically on offer.
3. Individuals feel part of a rising movement capable of doing what is needed to address threats.
Adaptation will build this dimension by amplifying the concerns of the climate majority and building self-awareness.
4. Members of the majority support each other through inevitable emotional struggles on the difficult journey to change.
This support takes place most effectively and naturally within communities - once again suggesting adaptation as an important enabler of motivated action.
Our Forthcoming report (title), [a]the second in this series, explores the relationships of these dimensions in more detail. We suggest that if reality threatens to overwhelm us, it is because no movement has created the sense of being enough to respond to it. The current report argues that adaptation is a means of catalyzing such a movement.
While adaptation is a vital catalyst to four dimensions of climate action, we warn that it cannot fully address concerns. Any serious engagement with the realities of adaptation will show that it is already necessary, and can usefully reduce climate risks, but only partially[38]. It should be clear that this campaign does not advocate adaptation instead of decarbonisation (either/or’). Decarbonization requires majority support that will not materialise until ‘climate change’ becomes a lived reality for communities - a process greatly accelerated by adaptation.[39]
Governments delaying adequate decarbonisation (and adaptation) measures operate on a tacit assumption that climate damage will be managed, when the time comes, through adaptation measures. Sadly, not even a stunningly effective adaptation agenda, and a rapid worldwide transition towards strategic adaptation would prevent unprecedented disasters causing damage and loss of life.
Adaptation cannot offset all risks (e.g. “hurricane-proofing” is not possible) and becomes deeply inadequate if very high levels of warming are allowed and impacts worsen rapidly. Thus decarbonisation is still needed and adaptation action is a partner to decarbonisation action rather than a replacement. Any serious enquiry or effort to adapt on the part of the Government will reveal the limits of adaptive possibilities, building the urgent case for prevention through serious decarbonisation. Such efforts are also necessary to build the common sense appeal of Transformative Adaptation measures that are themselves low-carbon and ecologically sound. (See section 3.)
Case Study: AMOC Breakdown and the limits of adaptation
The breakdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could potentially be the most significant impact of climate change. AMOC is the system of ocean currents that transfers heat from the tropics toward higher latitudes, and is the reason why the UK’s climate is not more like places at similar latitudes such as southern Canada or Moscow. However, evidence suggests that climate change is weakening AMOC, and may cause it to start breaking down as early as the next decade. We don’t know if or when this will happen, but this is the nature of the adaptation challenge.
AMOC breakdown could cause a gradual drop of temperature reaching 5°C within a few decades, posing vast challenges for places like the UK including agriculture (which already struggles to provide food security in the event of droughts), housing insulation and heating. Changing precipitation patterns would increase susceptibility to both flooding and drought. Infrastructure—such as coastal defenses, transport networks, and energy grids—could face new stresses if rising sea levels combine with altered ocean currents to intensify storm surges. Obviously, policymakers, local communities, and businesses all have strong reasons to begin considering adaptation strategies for AMOC now, and this need may become dire if scientific reports continue to worsen.
Just as obviously, there is no such thing as fully adapting to a 5°C temperature drop. It is simply impossible for life in the UK to remain the same with such dramatic changes. Much would be lost and much harm would be unavoidable.
An important form of adaptation planning involves a serious contingency plan for AMOC breakdown - for communities, the UK, and Europe. However, if the reader allows themselves a moment to think about this, we are confident that their own conclusions will concretely illustrate a point made throughout this report. While adaptation can have immediate benefits at the community and individual level, in a way that decarbonisation cannot, it is no substitute for decarbonisation. If we try to deal with today’s problems purely through adaptation we will find ourselves dealing with something like AMOC – or worse – tomorrow.
In the industrialised global North, working class people are among many groups under-represented in the wider climate movement.[40] Among contributing factors, decarbonisation-heavy campaign messages highlighting individual consumption and ideas such as ‘carbon footprint’ have not appealed to less affluent groups. Additionally, some media have further weaponised class issues to brand climate action as an elitist project that dishes out blame, makes life worse for working class people, and attacks free choice and traditional values - feeding a vicious cycle of under-representation.[41]
Working class disenfranchisement in climate action is disastrous, when majority mobilisation is needed to mandate radical policy action.[42] [43] Nor does it reflect the historic and ongoing commitment to environmentalism among working class groups.[44] Large sections of the population may thus be better included by reorienting campaigning strategy, rhetoric and action around adaptation, thereby reconnecting environmentalism with material concerns. Adaptation will be vital both to increase people’s agency amid coming impacts and to grow support for change.
The vulnerability of environmentalism to polarising critique is greatly reduced by a shift in emphasis - from ‘reduce your carbon footprint’ to ‘let’s make sure everybody can protect themselves from the coming damage (as far as possible)’. From this angle, the climate movement doesn’t seek to limit freedom but rather to preserve it - and protect quality of life amid escalating climate decline.
Ideas and practices like adaptation, resilience-building, and collective preparedness have potential to engage and empower people whose living standards will be most impacted by climate damage - whether they face rising bills, cold, damp or uninsurable homes, water damage, or any other immediate risk.[45] If a majority can be recruited to (reformed) climate issues on this basis, the climate movement increases its democratic capacity to advocate for both decarbonisation and adaptation - not to mention climate justice.[46] [47]
1.6 International precedent
Britain is one of the most visible nations on the world stage for a number of historic reasons. The country has also historically taken pride in international leadership on climate action, becoming the first country to set legally binding emissions reduction targets in 2008. Progress to deliver on ambitious goals has stalled;[48] nonetheless, the country’s continued visibility on the world stage maintains potential to influence other wealthy nations in the global North by example. The UK’s soft power has declined since 2016 but remains prominent[49] - and the current Government considers its revival a priority.[50] A UK electorate embracing climate adaptation has significant potential to generate imitation.
The struggle to define adaptation will be a defining struggle of the coming decade. Unavoidably, policy-makers across the political spectrum will soon become aware of the climate threat, and turn towards the adaptation space. In the UK for example, this process has already begun, with areas of the civil service working urgently on preparedness, mostly out of view of the media and even ministers. As living conditions continue to decline and institutional adaptation response becomes a democratic focus, a credible Strategic Adaptation approach/movement must be ready to counteract the political appeal of hard-right ‘populist’ parties and leaders, and the media that promote them. Robust, coordinated effort will be necessary to steer the narrative of adaptation - its purpose, its design and implementation toward just ecological and social outcomes.
Some figures within the alt- and hard-Right are already turning away from hard climate denialism. In seeking a ‘fortress’ approach to adaptation, thoroughly divorced from decarbonisation, they have obvious allies in the fossil fuel industry.[51] If this coalition is not opposed by competing visions of adaptation while traditional power and the wider public are waking up to the necessity, then ‘fortress’ adaptation gains a great advantage. With a record of undermining democratic principles to advance a polluting agenda unlikely to transform in the era of adaptation, the fossil fuel lobby has long been shifting away from outright climate denial towards a strategy of “deception, disinformation, and doublespeak.”[52] [53] For some years this has involved support for fortess adaptation.[54]
As climate decline intensifies, the risk grows of becoming locked into a derailment cycle, with the majority of resources pulled towards disaster response and little time or money left for proactive, preventative resilience-building (let alone decarbonisation).[55] In disaster contexts, leaders of many political stripes will likely reach for reactive adaptation methods such as dredging and hard flood defences. Decarbonisation has always been hurt by politicians focused on short-term popularity, and reactive adaptation can easily become tomorrow’s distraction. Populist leaders are particularly likely to favour this kind of adaptation,[56] reinforcing the dichotomy of adaptation-instead-of-mitigation and normalising approaches that are high-emitting, expensive and fragilising. This trend is already visible - for example, a shift from outright climate-denialism to adaptation-focus on the Australian Right, and some policies and messages of the Reform UK Party.[57] To pre-empt this risk as far as possible, alternative strategic approaches to adaptation must be developed and mainstreamed - see section 3.1.
This campaign arises from within the broad climate movement - but the benefits of locally focused climate adaptation extend far beyond damage-reduction, climate engagement and even narrative transformation. Improvements to quality of life potentially arising from adaptation measures extend from economic and physical health benefits to transformation in psycho-social wellbeing. Consider for example the benefits of retrofit activities such as insulation on energy use, impacting both home comfort and outgoings. Or of localisation on air quality, diet, exercise and mobility. Meanwhile efforts to promote local resilience and self sufficiency, from food and energy to mental health will repeatedly bring communities together. Where communities have suffered fragmenting effects, collaboration in the face of common threat can strengthen bonds, embed mutual aid, build trust and reduce the social fragmentation that is itself a critical driver of unsustainable behaviours at a global level. Adaptation efforts can build and restore the sense of a collective that is foundational to tackling collective action problems. As climate disasters mount, the best chance of limiting acceleration towards collapse is to turn towards community and grow solidarity. And across the UK, citizens demonstrate hunger for more community.[58]
Thus Strategic Adaptation approaches aim at whole-system consideration. Adaptation measures are integrated with whole ways of life, which in turn are inextricably linked with behaviours that can deepen or reduce climate damage.
Antifragility
While the idea of resilience can be taken to mean ‘robustness’, it may be better understood as ability to change (rather than simply fortify) in response to change. For human societies like all other natural systems, the capacity to create something new and vital out of the collapse of the old has forever been crucial to survival and flourishing. Likewise for individuals, wisdom traditions from Buddhism to psychotherapy and permaculture[59] identify the experience of crisis with the seeds of renewal. In the absence of appropriate action, this attitude can be dismissed as grasping for silver linings or even a callous accelerationist view. However, in the age of consequences that we currently inhabit, an understanding of antifragility[60] can help us mobilise the aspects of our culture and being that benefit from shocks, mistakes and volatility, and change what needs to change in order to thrive in new conditions.
An antifragile vision of adaptation goes beyond the framing of disaster recovery to something infinitely more hopeful and regenerative. In simpler terms, with the necessary inner and outer resources, breakdown can bring out the best in us[61]- creating a chance we would never otherwise have chosen to let go of what is broken and rebuild better. [b]
Acute climate impacts, by suspending the normal structures of lived existence, can provide amid the chaos an astonishing opportunity to remake whole ways of life for the better. However, wishful thinking isn’t enough to make it happen. Antifragility is not simply an innate capacity. The more ecological health and material resource that we can preserve intact, the greater will be our agency to protect what remains, recover and begin again. The stronger the bonds that we cultivate ahead of time, the greater the strength of our communities to weather the storms ahead, envisioning a better future together. Early, effective, inner-outer adaptation is foundational to our antifragility.
Multilateral efforts to mitigate climate breakdown suffer heavily from a ‘collective action problem’. In short, whereas all would ultimately benefit from working together to cut climate-dangerous emissions, individual countries may feel incentivised to act selfishly while others take the strain. Furthermore no individual country can, by itself, secure a safe future by virtue of its own emissions. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that vulnerability to climate impacts and their likely timeframes vary between countries. Thanks to the same intangibility named above, those who feel less vulnerable may not perceive what they stand to gain by acting collectively to mitigate - especially if they tend towards shorter-term priorities.
Conversely however, the tendency for wealthy countries to cling to decarbonisation targets that they have no plan to deliver, directing the majority of funding towards decarbonisation and mostly ignoring adaptation, may itself contain a selfish motive. Admitting the need for adaptation could entail vast support of climate-vulnerable populations abroad. A theoretical, purely selfish nation, might feel incentivised to direct the efforts of others towards decarbonisation, and play down the need for adaptation. “We won’t feel the direct benefits of their preparedness - but we might be asked to pay for it. But if everyone reduces emissions, we benefit.” Promoting adaptation might furthermore come too close to accepting liability for the damages caused by emissions, inviting litigation from more vulnerable countries.[62]
Climate approaches that foreground direct investment in adaptation are less prone to collective action problems than purely decarbonisation-focused strategies. Adaptation avoids one of the deepest motivational challenges faced by decarbonisation: for everybody, even the biggest polluter, their ‘unilateral’ decarbonisation will not noticeably affect their personal experience of climate chaos. Many people struggle with taking action while knowing they cannot reliably protect their own communities or assets, and want assurances that others will play their part. This is particularly true of people who are not motivated by abstract moral arguments. However, because adaptation action can be taken with significant effect locally without needing to coordinate of all humanity, it can much more easily be undertaken widely across the world. Paradoxically, then, this selfish action can make it clear how much of humanity shares our fears and thus help us work together to overcome the collective action problems that have plagued climate change.
Meanwhile, by bringing home the reality of impacts as discussed above, adaptation can strengthen the collective incentive to decarbonise, and disrupt the stalling narrative that weak incremental measures will eventually save the day.
The wicked collective action problem is a pervasive obstacle to adequate climate intervention - probably its greatest. But we should not assume therefore that it cannot be lessened. When it comes to system solutions, innovation rarely targets such psychological and cultural barriers to outer change, and a great deal more could be done to bring strategic attention to the psychology of collective action.[63]
Geopolitical stability and polarised attitudes to immigration
Beyond an unhelpfully narrow question of who foots the bill, supporting adaptation in vulnerable countries is compatible with wealthier nations’ ‘enlightened self-interest.’ The stability of all is supported by funding countries on the climate front line to prepare and adapt; and avoid displacement. As impacts escalate, particularly in the global South, wealthy countries like the UK may be able to help protect great numbers of people from losing their homes by supporting them to adapt safely at both community and national levels.
This logic must be handled with the utmost sensitivity and care to avoid xenophobic hijack. However, immigration is among the most polarising flashpoints in UK politics.[64] The cultural and economic pressure surrounding this issue is likely to increase as climate breakdown threatens to make whole regions uninhabitable. In this context, adaptation funding may represent a rare example of political common ground: supporting vulnerable communities to adapt is compatible both with their well-being and political trends that want less immigration. Pragmatic humanitarianism advises gathering support from all corners, without expecting (unrealistically) that all motivations are universalist.
For example, systematic worldwide programmes of greening cities[65] or climate-proofing agriculture through methods like ‘solar-shading’ or agrivoltaics[66] can significantly protect habitability in affected areas and reduce key ‘push’ factors that will lead increasingly to large-scale displacement. Naturally such interventions are themselves beset by collective action problems. Who pays for the greening of cities in vulnerable areas? Nonetheless, the logic of ‘enlightened self-interest’ applies to adaptation funding for the distant and vulnerable, just as there is a logic in funding decarbonisation. This logic applies just as well, of course, to food security and economics. Humanity has created a world economy and a world food system and the UK is deeply enmeshed in both. Collapse anywhere across the world will help to create insecurity everywhere. Leaders and the public must be encouraged to recognise their interest in world-wide adaptation - and here too the UK may choose to use its influence and set a precedent among other wealthy nations.
SAFER is an integrated campaign whose objectives are designed to support one another.
To translate these motivations into desirable outcomes, the nature of adaptation promoted and implemented must be carefully and ethically defined. Climate adaptation is a nascent field operating in changeable conditions. Not all efforts to adapt reduce vulnerability or succeed at protecting citizens - many fail, and some are actively maladaptive; heightening direct vulnerability and/or deepening environmental harm.[71] [72]
Without delay, we need to talk about what we mean by ‘adaptation’. Straightforward clarifications are necessary - for example, underlining its connection with actual and future climate impacts, and adapting to the effects of climate destruction, rather than adapting to use less carbon - but this is only the beginning. Of particular importance will be adaptation focused at the level of community - the minimum unit of human[c][d][e] life with any prospect of self-reliance.[73] We’ll need kind adaptation that does not compromise the needs of some for others, and fair adaptation that doesn’t leave people or communities behind. We’ll need adaptation approaches that prioritise our collective inner strength as well as our outer vulnerability.
Climate adaptation takes many forms - some protective, some maladaptive. As impacts accelerate, it’s important to distinguish between:
Reactive Adaptation (/ shallow / defensive / incremental adaptation): short-term focused measures in response to actual impacts - such as building flood barriers in areas that have already flooded. Reactive measures seek to protect the current system and do not necessarily aim to avoid further ecological destruction - for example, energy-hungry space cooling. Reactive adaptation does not aim at any adaptive mindset shift, but most represents efforts to fortify business as usual in deteriorating conditions. The current mainstream concept of adaptation. Reactive adaptation tends to predominate in disaster contexts.
Deep Adaptation: radical adaptation measures for expected collapse of existing societal structures - e.g. reducing scale of coastal cities and moving populations inland and reducing their scale; and preparing people psychologically for potential collapse. Deep Adaptation approaches are largely theoretical (at least in the global North) but will likely grow in practical application as awareness of probable collapse grows.
Transformative Adaptation: systemic changes to address root causes of climate risk.[74] Adaptation measures rooted in deeper system change, and mindset shift towards new ways of life. Transformative approaches don’t disregard carbon cost when protecting against damage but actively decarbonise and protect and restore nature where possible, ultimately helping orient towards ecological civilisation.[75] For example, restoring wetlands/mangroves; localised food production using less industrial methods, with less dependence on the far-away. Importantly, TrAd is itself fundamentally changeable; aiming at ‘dialectical’ responsiveness to the ongoing transformation of the environment, resources, capabilities etc.
Limits of existing frames
Both reactive and deep adaptation are important on their own terms, but where either dominates future policy, the result may be harmful. For example, reactive adaptation is often piecemeal, can come at a high carbon cost, and prolongs an attitude of preservation towards a broken political economy. As climate disasters become more common, reactive adaptation approaches may dominate, but could ultimately end up increasing vulnerability (maladaptation).[76] Deep adaptation, in its catastrophe-led framing, can be intimidating to new audiences - and risks unduly abandoning the possibility of transformation to preserve existing value. Approaches that transcend both are badly needed. Transformative Adaptation does so, but does not explicitly account for the practical defensive value of reactive adaptation measures, and their potential role in fostering a necessary mindset shift. Furthermore, its current platform(s) may appeal more intuitively to a ‘progressive’ audience than policymakers or mainstream citizens.
We propose a fourth frame, Strategic Adaptation: integrating elements of all the above, in a wholistic theory of change accessible to policy-makers and change-makers.
Strategic Adaptation:
A pragmatic approach sensitive to local circumstances, Strategic Adaptation may combine elements of reactive, deep and transformative adaptation wherever they are available and helpful, while remaining alert to ‘collateral damage’ that may inhere in purely reactive or deep adaptation approaches.
As damage worsens, demand for protection is already increasing, from businesses and other citizens, both rich and poor. Leaders are unsurprisingly reaching for the basic tools of reactive adaptation. Furthermore without a strategic adaptation lens, pressure to rebuild fuels an ongoing carbon-hungry cycle, favouring the short-term priorities of those rich enough to rebuild.[77]
In order to avoid a fragilising cycle of merely ‘responding’ to disasters, communications efforts are necessary to translate this citizen pressure into a strong case for Strategic and transformative adaptation approaches. As reactive adaptation is gradually recognised as insufficient, Strategic Adaptation must be a visible better option. This will require urgent mainstreaming of strategic approaches, and a substantial body of innovation and proof of practice made accessible.[78]
Sensitivity to local needs is essential to Strategic Adaptation and resilience-building. Whereas decarbonisation is in many ways a global challenge, adaptation and preparedness challenges vary according to local (geographic and social) needs and can benefit from the support and collaboration of direct beneficiaries. Highly local design and implementation is paramount - consider for example the difference between adaptation challenges in Spanish drylands and Spanish temperate rainforests.[79]
Furthermore, as researchers have pointed out, insufficiently localised, overly general approaches to adaptation may reinforce the unsustainable status quo and deepen existing patterns of social inequality, generating significant social resistance.[80] Context-sensitive adaptation initiatives led by local stakeholders are highly necessary to avoid not only tension in implementation, but maladaptation born of irrelevant, unsuitable and insensitive top-down approaches.
Few national Governments are comfortable allocating large funds for local governance. When it comes to international adaptation funding, donor governments prefer to give to national governments, or sometimes to large NGOs. Beneficiary governments are often reluctant to release control of funds to community level, usually dictate how funds should be spent, and should therefore be encouraged to prioritise local adaptation initiatives. Until prejudice against the local is overcome, adaptation, with its distinctively local parameters, will never be taken seriously enough.
Adaptation starts at home
From national strategic adaptation to community resilience and household ruggedization, attending to ‘home’ adaptation interests is not only justifiable but essential - not least because those in a condition of preparedness remain more able to help others more vulnerable. At the national level, while it would be most unjust to advocate ‘lock, stock’ completion of adaptation at home before offering assistance to others who will feel impacts more acutely and sooner, both aid and global decarbonisation are dependent on less vulnerable countries’ avoidance of derailment risk.[81] Therefore, attention is also due to resilience closer to home.
The concept of climate adaptation typically calls to mind physical interventions, from flood defences to innovations in crop growing. Of equally crucial importance in the face of current and coming challenges is inner, psychological resilience - of individuals but particularly at the level of community. The work of inner adaptation is arguably as important as the more obvious work of outer adaptation.
For individuals, difficult emotions such as climate grief and anxiety, as well as broader psychological impacts of interrelated crises from geopolitical instability to social fragmentation, exert a toll on mental health that should be considered among climate impacts. Experience of emotional overwhelm can furthermore exacerbate unsustainable, even addictive behaviours, and dampens engagement with climate reality and support for system change: a vicious circle between mind and climate.[82]
Interventions are possible that support emotional resilience at individual level, and training and provision should be funded to support necessary approaches.[83] However, difficult emotions such as anxiety and grief are sane and healthy responses to planetary crisis, and better treated as signs of systemic dysfunction than individual pathology. As such, among the most important ways to alleviate inner climate impacts is connection within community.[84] [85] Social connection is a known promoter of wellbeing; supporting agency[86] and reducing depression and anxiety.[87] Conversely, when considering the preparedness in the face of first and second order climate impacts, from home and infrastructure damage to energy disruption, supply scarcity and worse disasters, building the inner resilience of communities is paramount.
For example, much research demonstrates the role of social cohesion following disasters.[88] Communities with robust social networks and strong bonds of social connectedness, good will, trust and belonging, are better able to take organised action in the face of damage, maintain social order, mitigate distress, and recover. In turn, as discussed in section 1.8, collaboration around ‘outer’ local adaptation initiatives can help build the bonds that support inner resilience: a virtuous cycle. For these reasons inner and outer resilience should not be considered as separate domains, but rather two essential dimensions of Strategic Adaptation: inner-outer resilience.
Adaptation is a complex task; interacting with many dimensions of climate action, system change and ways of life. SAFER falls within the CMP’s integrated theory of change, and as such some campaign themes are already operational in our existing work. Many of the activities outlined here will be initiated and / or delivered through existing CMP programmes and relationships; some additional foundation organisations are detailed here. (For new campaign activities, see Section 5.)
Theme: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Resilience.
Britain is chronically nature-depleted, directly influencing locally felt climate impacts - for example, thanks to vanishing wetlands and poor upland-management, vulnerability to flooding is far higher. Adaptation priorities must include rebalancing and restoring ecosystems, to help communities become resilient and even anti-fragile. ‘Agriwilding’ furthermore integrates rewilding with food-growing,[89] with potential to soften the ‘culture war’ resonance sometimes associated with rewilding (in particular, hostility between rewilding and agricultural communities). Agriwilding may be an important agent of depolarisation, and a “win-win-win” in Transformative Adaptation terms (good for nature, good for food resilience, good for cultural relationships.)[90]
Activity:
Already part of the CMP incubator, Wild Card is Britain’s most successful cutting-edge rewilding organisation/movement, with potential to spearhead rewilding as a pillar of Transformative Adaptation. Future campaign activities will furthermore seek to build relationships with and promote agriwilding initiatives.
Theme: Retrofit.
Retrofit is an obvious focus for Strategic Adaptation combining home and neighbourhood adaptation with decarbonisation, and bridging local resilience priorities with ‘climate jobs’, important in serving the needs of target demographics and achieving a just transition.
Activity
CMP collaborates with and showcases Retrofit Balsall Heath[91], a nationally-leading local retrofit scheme. We plan to amplify their story, including promotion of their short ‘street demonstrator’ film (currently in production), via our own network and PR channels. [92]
Theme: Inner adaptation, climate emotions and psychological resilience
Difficult emotions such as climate grief and anxiety should be understood as climate impacts. Building collective mental resilience is an important example of Transformative Adaptation, necessitating funded programmes to build inner capacities in the context of climate.[93] Furthermore, as climate damage affects daily life, from supply scarcity to homes and public services, the inner resilience of citizens will matter more and more to public wellbeing, and its cultivation must be considered the proper territory of climate adaptation.
Activity
The CMP’s Climate Courage campaign is working strategically to support initiatives that resource climate distress, helping people impacted to process difficulty and find routes to agency and empowerment. Currently the campaign is focused in education settings, with later phases targeted towards the general population.[94] We will seek further funding for this campaign; in particular for resourcing current and future leaders in local resilience-building, in both psycho-social and material dimensions. Alongside the Climate Psychology Alliance and the Mindfulness Initiative, we are working as lead partners within ICRA, the Inner Climate Response Alliance. Funding already secured will support the CC campaign through 2025, including parliamentary liaison work.
Theme: Resilient communities
Inner resilience is only in limited ways a matter of the individual: it is best fostered by strengthening direct community and restoring a sense of social trust, belonging and collective care.
Activity: From local food and energy initiatives to disaster preparedness, practical participation in transformative local adaptation can mutually strengthen communities by building relationships of co-concern and collaboration (see also Section 1.8). As such a thread of resilience building runs through all campaign and partner activities. In the CMP incubator, ‘Postcode Revolution’[f] works specifically to encourage hyper-local, resilient, low energy communities. The group aims to counter fragmentation and polarisation through focus on relationships based on common goals and pragmatic neighbourhood action. Communities of support and resilience are an ongoing focus of the Climate Courage Campaign.
Theme: The role of corporates in transitioning from decarbonisation to adaptation paradigm.
Within business and finance, the ‘Race to Zero’ is severely off-track. The ‘Race to Resilience’, a poor relation thus far, needs resource and attention. The more businesses focused on the adaptation challenge, the greater the economic mindset shift beyond soft denial and tech solutionism.
Activity
Adequate Government policy on adaptation is a key demand of the Regulate Us campaign from Market Shapers - CMP’s business strand.[95] The CMP is convening a private group of insurance-related industry insiders with a systematic emphasis on strategic adaptation, advocating e.g. low premiums for customers who undertake resilience-building[96]. Many such innovations will become commonplace in the insurance field, which in turn has high leverage in business and finance. Insurance also wields considerable lobbying influence, and power to communicate the depth of the crisis and attendant risk.[97]
Theme: Food as vulnerability, icon and vector.
The UK is alarmingly far from food security, let alone food sovereignty. As climate breakdown unfolds, on top of shortages we risk a number of ecological vicious circles unless action is taken early to prepare and adapt. For example, panic measures in response to scarcity could lead to ecological damage - intensified pesticide use and clearing wild land for crops, and so on. Such outcomes would quickly lead to far greater fragility in our food system through e.g. collapse of pollinator populations and soil depletion. The UK still has no coherent food policy. In considering building resilience, experts highlight the example of grassroots initiatives who are often working ahead of central Government to ensure communities are resilient to shocks to food supplies.[98]
The deep psychological and cultural salience of food suggests its role as an icon of adaptation.[99] Its importance as an everyday vector of climate awareness cannot be overstated, especially in the enduringly garden-loving UK. Almost half the British population is connected with growing conditions through their own gardens, with additional numbers responsible for allotments and local projects. Numbers of younger gardeners in particular were boosted by covid-19 lockdowns.[100]
Activity:
In both urban and rural settings, a growing number of grassroots ‘Climate Hubs’ such as the Blackdown Hills Eco Hub, are exploring local food resilience. The CMP incubator has supported a number of initiatives involved in related activities.[101] Other existing food-related climate initiatives vary considerably in their awareness of adaptation and mainstream appeal (e.g. Local Futures, Incredible Edible, the Transition Towns Movement).[102] [103] Among SAFER’s core aims is to amplify the function of these initiatives and encourage them to adapt messaging to foreground communities’ resilience to disrupted food supplies, at least as much as decarbonisation.
A current branch of CMP research inquires into the realities of food growing in cold conditions, with the intention to support adaptation awareness among these groups as conditions become increasingly precarious.[104]
Theme: Water as a keystone resource
Among the resources foundational to societal functioning at any timescale, water may be under greatest threat from climate impacts. In the UK, whether our future is hotter or colder, water will likely become more scarce, with increased drought, existing systems highly stressed and leaky, insufficient reservoir capacity, and difficulty absorbing heavier downpours. Water scarcity naturally has consequences for crop growing and food security.
Poor water husbandry magnifies the chaos brought by both drought and flooding from heavier downpours, which we have seen across the globe (including Britain) in autumn 2024. Local residents have a direct role to play in adapting to impacts, from rainwater storage to the choice of paving in their gardens.
Activity:
Water-storage and water-husbandry are likely to become increasingly important political priorities, and communities will play their role until adequate political leadership emerges. Citizen science (e.g. vulnerability data) will be important, alongside simpler efforts to collect rain and grey water. SAFER will aim to raise awareness and to develop existing relationships within DEFRA towards promoting decentralised water-husbandry.
Beyond existing and integrated activities above, SAFER will respond to adaptation’s campaigning gap through a number of targeted campaign activities.
These will include:
National Adaptation Plan
Aim: Influence the Labour Government to design and implement a NATIONAL ADAPTATION[g] PLAN.[105]
The Government is required to produce a national adaptation ‘programme’ under the Climate Change Act - however the third ‘programme’ (2024) is thoroughly inadequate and under-resourced. To protect citizens and deliver on existing and future programmes of government, a comprehensive policy framework must be developed, funded and implemented.
As climate chaos grows in frequency it is a matter of time before “a perfect storm” of interacting climate impacts gathers; sufficient to jeopardise basic support systems.[106] UK policy-makers are in position to realise this now, and when climate disasters strike the lack of preparation will become obvious to voters. As former civil servant Simon Sharpe observes, the public has entrusted the Government not with looking on the brightside, but with preparing for the worst.[107]
Activity:
Petition and supporting media: call upon the UK Government to introduce a National Adaptation[h] Plan, with the input of affected citizens. Campaign activity will challenge Labour to future-proof their big investments - and to consider that national security hinges on adequate adaptation.[108]
The campaign will emphasise that until the UK is prepared, it is increasingly vulnerable, and no other mission for renewal is on safe ground.[109] For example, in the specific case of Labour’s clean energy mission, decarbonisation strategy is wholly contingent upon adaptation strategy to protect the relevant infrastructure from climate impacts. For example, new transmission networks (pylons etc) are not hardened against colder weather.[110] More generally, all of the Government’s ‘missions’ risk being swept away, without emergency resilience built in.
Development of a NAP should involve deliberative democracy, and centre the ‘crowdsourced’ knowledge and innovation of affected communities.
The People’s Plan for Climate Resilience (PPCR)
Aim: Effect a shift in perception of climate from public as consumer to public as citizens.
Activity:
Campaign leaders are currently working on a draft plan for a People’s Plan for Climate Resilience with partners including Jon Alexander, author of Citizens and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, and leaders from New Local and the Climate Coalition. This citizen-centric ‘bottom-up’ plan will be founded on principles of deliberative democracy. Modelled on learning from the 2023 People’s Plan For Nature; the project will crowdsource plans for community resilience and requirements for government support, on a local basis. This initiative will be integrated with advocacy for a National Adaptation[i] plan (see above).
Local communities are already feeling the effects of the climate crisis, even on recreation - from sports practice, to outdoor festivals and events cancelled due to sudden downpours and flooding.[111] Many are currently unprepared, but will take an important role as ‘first responders’ when climate disasters strike. [112][j]
To engage deeply in the distributed work of local adaptation, communities require particular skills and democratic frameworks. A PPCR is an integral device in helping overcome learned helplessness, grow agency, and deepen the practical wisdom of citizenship and of living with and on the land. The project will help develop collective intelligence on local adaptation and grow communities’ deliberative skills nationwide.
The grassroots, collaborative character of a PPCR serves a more general need to rebuild the bonds of communities around common cause.
Dialogue between affected groups and environmental leaders
Aim: build connection with disengaged groups
As discussed in Section 1.5, a shift from decarbonisation-only messaging towards integrating adaptation can allow the environmental movement greater inclusivity of social groups beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of progressive activism. For example, many people in a low income bracket are understandably unmoved by environmentalism that pressures them to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’. Climate advocacy must start where people are: impacted by spiralling living costs; concerned about their kids; noticing climate decline most directly when extreme weather affects their daily lives.
Essential to the nation’s journey of collective resilience-building is understanding - on the part of climate policymakers, 'experts', and campaigners - of the particular strengths and struggles of affected communities.
Activity:
SAFER aims to bring affected groups into productive dialogue with environmentalism. The CMP has secured funding specifically to convene a series of conversations between leading figures in the organised working class and sympathetic figures in climate advocacy, designed to lessen polarisation, support mutual understanding and fuel public thought-leadership. Central to these conversations will be Strategic Adaptation as a route to inclusion and engagement of less enfranchised groups.
Convening the UK adaptation space
Aim: supporting self awareness, strengthening and cultivating relationships within the field
Unlike decarbonisation, the ‘field’ of adaptation is still disparate, and has not benefited from the profile and resource needed to coalesce. Relatively little resource has as yet been devoted to movement-building in this area - however collective awareness between emerging players is growing and requires active support.
Activity:
CMP is working with Cadence Roundtable[113] and with the Network for Social Change to help foster awareness, relationships and collaboration within this space. In 2025, the NSC aims to co-convene a series of increasingly large gatherings of those involved locally, conceptually and in policy, with the participation and support of CMP.
Incredible resources for adaptation are already emerging,[114] but the groups and organisations innovating in this area require integration, resourcing and amplification. They need a supportive narrative that identifies their actions as pivotal to society, and presents them not as avant garde but everyday.
Adaptation toolkit
Aim: resource families and neighbourhoods to access locally appropriate adaptation
To become popular, adaptation cannot be difficult to access, or financially costly for those with limited resources. Climate education must be provided, and ‘adaption toolkits’ should be available: including simple handbooks outlining preparedness measures and directing to regionally appropriate help for families and neighbourhoods (such as access to drinking water). Where appropriate, this initiative should extend to providing physical items, such as flood-defence kits for homes in at-risk areas. Legislation and funding from national and local government is required to facilitate this kind of practical help, and its necessity must become part of a political conversation.
Activity:
We propose to pilot a crowdsourced adaptation manual as part of the People’s Plan for Climate Resilience, with communications emphasising severe lack of resilience planning in the UK.
Adaptation case studies.
Aim: Gather and publish strong case study examples to inspire grassroots adaptation
Activity:
Foundational campaign activities will include production of a series of short films, bringing transformative / strategic adaptation to life through case studies. These will include scenarios from the hyper-local (e.g. what does flood preparedness look like for a home or street like mine?) to adapting businesses (e.g. how can we protect and shorten or simplify our supply-lines?).
This project will ask what the UK has to learn from other countries who have already begun work on adaptation. For example, Colombia’s ‘Green Corridors’[115] that shelter street vendors and pedestrians, Spain’s adjustment[116] of the working day to avoid the hottest hours, or Berlin’s ‘Heat Aid’[117] scheme for the homeless.
Lessons from history
Aim: Climate breakdown is a modern problem but periods of crisis are nothing new. Attention to historic precedent can build support for preparedness, and activate civic pride, helping unite communities.
Activity:
Through communications activities we’ll emphasise precedents for the various dimensions of strategic adaptation, drawing attention to popular historic episodes from the UK and across the world.
Example 1: World War II
Adequate response to climate breakdown requires national mobilisation at the scale of a war footing - however, as discussed above, public support for such a response won’t be galvanised by a distant, abstract threat. For significant parts of the UK population, World War II and the community cohesion, commitment and co-operation surrounding it remain a foundation of national identity and imagined threat response.[118] Strong parallels can be drawn with climate impacts and adaptation.
Example 2: Thames Flood Barrier.
Built in response to flooding in 1953, the flood barrier was a visionary project that is now taken for granted. Its example can support communications aiming to ‘mainstream’ adaptation.[119]
Engaging the social imaginary
Aim: mobilise imagination in creating desirable futures
Taking adaptation seriously requires taking imagination seriously - particularly, investment in the popular / democratic capacity to imagine possible futures. Imagination is a capacity sometimes treated as fanciful or unserious, when in reality it is an essential and often undervalued skill - even properly a mode of perception.[120] Imagination is always active in creating social realities - however in today’s world its energy is often preoccupied with imagining the inevitability and intractability of current systems. What’s required is therefore not to introduce imagination as if it weren’t already operating, but draw attention to its existing power and reclaim imaginative agency.[121]
The modes of radical imagination relevant to adaptation range from concrete infrastructure, architecture, engineering and technology to artistic interactions with the social imaginary through e.g. story. For example, ‘thrutopias’ are stories that do not cling to business as usual, avoid the difficulty in humanity’s future or descend into doomism, but imagine ways through hardship: a narrative form of Transformative Adaptation. The art world has an important role in helping thrutopian vision to mature, and normalising adaptation.
Before long, citizens will be called upon to imagine new directions for their society. To foster shared consideration of guiding values and move towards consensus, supported conversations are required that can ‘include and transcend’ narrower ideologies (including progressive ideology, its relationship with decarbonisation approaches and utopian outcomes, and enduring suspicion towards adaptation approaches) while preserving their value, and opening imagination to possible futures.
Activity:
This strand of work is led by Rupert Read for CMP. Activities are planned through 2025, grant-funded by Open Society Foundation, with a focus on bringing citizens together to imagine a world beyond business as usual, that can inspire across political divides, through the lens of the climate crisis. This work will support collective exploration of varied approaches to transition and adaptation among a majority considering new direction(s).[122] A key methodology will be ‘depolarising dialogues’, where the CMP already has significant experience.
We’re entering a permanent global emergency, whose impacts will be felt most acutely through local emergencies. Strategic Adaptation is an absolute necessity: both in order to increase resilience locally, and to translate emergent impacts and response into the strongest possible case for ‘higher’ level decarbonisation. Humanity’s future will contain harm at a scale difficult to comprehend. But we can prevent many degrees of worse harm if, integrated with urgent decarbonisation, we build preparedness and resilience to current and worsening impacts.
Adaptation as an approach to climate transition is growing in influence.[123] In coming years, the need for societies to prepare for climate threats, to build resilience, and maintain humanity by protecting those most vulnerable, will only increase. However, as ‘long emergencies’ such as climate breakdown produce acute disasters, compounding other crises from pandemics to armed conflict, we risk a vicious cycle. If a dwindling pool of resources is sucked into ever-growing reactive adaptation and disaster-recovery costs and decarbonisation is deprioritised, our trajectory towards collapse grows ever steeper. Without a serious Strategic Adaptation movement from grassroots right through to national leadership, we will not escape it.
The ultimate ambition of SAFER is to disrupt this cycle through a series of interdependent steps:
I) As climate damage escalates, citizen pressure increases on leaders to deliver adaptation.
II) At first, shallow, reactive adaptation approaches dominate, in communications and in practice,
III) Meanwhile, advocacy and leadership in Strategic Adaptation begins to spread.
IV) Medium-term experience reveals shallow adaptation (downstream) measures to be self-defeating and fragilising. Strategic Adaptation approaches (upstream) grow in popular appeal.
V) As policy mindset shifts to ‘upstream’, strategic approaches, the urgent case for prevention is clear, and democratic support for decarbonisation emerges.
Whether these steps will really be enough to trigger the serious ‘real zero’ agenda that brings necessary decarbonisation remains in question. Without them, however, we are waiting for a miracle. Between these two poles, no energy spent trying is wasted: every effort towards strategic adaptation helps build antifragile capacity for communities near and far, and helps hasten the onset of stages III and IV, above.
As such, whether we’re talking about campaigning, diplomacy or policy it should be very clear that adaptation is the opposite of surrender to climate doomism. This isn’t the end of the world - but the threat we face grows with every day that citizens wait for decarbonisation from on high; feeling small and helpless, lacking an effective and coordinated response and neglecting our own power. To maintain sole focus on decarbonisation is totally inappropriate to the structural and social challenges of climate response. Channelling our vast collective energy into strategic preparedness can simultaneously protect communities and foster ecological restoration. And as we have argued, the best advocacy for decarbonisation is widespread, community- business- and sector-led adaptation.
In the context of a wider climate movement aiming to mobilise a majority, SAFER aims at a core narrative shift. To date, climate consciousness has largely meant attention to decarbonisation. It must now expand to adequately include adaptation. Adopting a new story is a matter of collective imagination - yet in a materially focused society, facing physically manifest problems such as climate breakdown, exercises in imagination are too easily be dismissed as unserious. If we’re serious about our own survival, we can no longer afford this attitude. Business as usual is maintained by failure to powerfully imagine the alternative.
As such an alternative, Strategic Adaptation seeks to prevent single disasters from becoming catastrophes, and multiple disasters from eroding our capacity to respond, transform and look to the future. To transform adversity and even disaster into opportunities to enrich community, and allow society to choose more beautiful futures.
A majority waits to be mobilised by climate action that can inspire its imagination. For many, this journey will finally begin with adaptation.
“Is the UK sufficiently vulnerable to climate impacts to prioritise adaptation?
As discussed in Section 1.1, the widespread assumption that countries like the UK are immune to severe climate disasters, even partial climate-driven collapse, is highly complacent. The UK may be vulnerable to extreme impacts - for example, the potential failure of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation[124] under stress of massive ice-melt in the Arctic could trigger a drop in temperature of up to 10°C.
The related assumption that wealthier countries in the global North are more robust and functional than countries in the global South is arrogant and inaccurate. Similar assumptions at the beginning of the Covid crisis - that ‘developed’ countries would be most resilient, and that the UK was among the countries best-prepared for a pandemic[125] - were misguided, as the Covid inquiry starkly demonstrated.[126] The UK coped far far worse than many West African and East Asian nations. Vaccine hoarding may have been the only strategy preventing the death toll from running into several hundreds of thousands. The USA was among the worst performing countries in the world.
When it comes to climate impacts, assumption of resilience would be even more dangerous. For example, the UK is nowhere near self-sufficient in its food supply and is vulnerable to both disrupted agriculture and international supply disruption.
The UK entertains hubristic vanity around solid organisation and good leadership. In reality, our communities are weakened and social support structures hollowed out - and we underrate our exposure to disruption of the complex technologies that we rely on.
A globally leading voice on the cultural psychology of climate breakdown, Amitav Ghosh takes the view that wealthy countries’ immense climate-vulnerability is all the more dangerous because it remains largely unacknowledged.[127]
Nothing is more important at this time than acknowledging the vulnerability of humans everywhere - global South and global North. To shift mindsets on climate reality, to encourage resilience, to fuel assistance and compensation, to drive decarbonisation, to avoid if possible the harshest scenarios of societal collapse.
"How can adaptation approaches can help depolarise climate action?”
Much emerging evidence suggests that while the idea of decarbonisation has become entangled in culture wars, polarisation around adaptation could still be avoidable if care is taken.[128]
Importantly, as discussed at length elsewhere, whereas support for decarbonisation often involves agreement on the existence of a threat that is diffuse and intangible, adaptation entails uniting around a common experience of threat. Its basis is not only shared experience, but shared danger, a factor with a historic tendency to overcome smaller differences and foster collaboration.
Among a public increasingly united on the need for adaptation,[129] some of the most significant opposition to adaptation has come from within progressive activism which remains attached to decarbonisation as a primary frame.
In 2019, the climate movement’s radical flank, including Extinction Rebellion and other new groups, made huge strides in raising climate awareness among the general population. Sooner than hoped, however, participation in XR slowed. Two factors are very important here. Firstly, later unpopular tactics and a radical public image played a part in a worsening spiral of public disapproval and vilification by a hostile media. Secondly, heavy focus on decarbonisation meant that while the alarm was raised, the threat remained intangible to many. While the second may seem less obvious than the first, it’s likely that the inaccessibility of the decarbonisation agenda fed into a general sense of alienation from ‘ordinary’ citizens that depressed participation and helped hostile media frames find a mark.
Consensus is growing behind adaptation as a necessity.[130] If the climate movement can be influenced to enact and advocate for adaptation - more tangible and more accessible to the majority - strong potential exists to reduce polarisation in the field of climate action.
“Won’t ‘Solar Radiation Management’ [SRM], solve global overheating, making local adaptation unnecessary?”
Some simpler forms of local and regional SRM are likely to be very useful in the years to come, for example systematic programmes to use heat-reflecting white paint that keeps buildings cool.
However, in the context of decarbonisation-failure, momentum is likely to gather behind reckless planetary-scale climate-engineering methods[131] such as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). In promising to hold down global temperatures despite the failure to hold down emissions, SAI is a unique ‘solution’. However its consequences are potentially catastrophic - and it’s important to keep discussing why - not least the ‘moral hazard’ of legitimizing ongoing carbonisation, leading to ocean acidification. In contrast to Strategic, Transformative Adaptation approaches, SRM should always be framed as a last resort; SAI a desperate, reactive mistake - never a policy option.
It makes sense to hope that, following tangible crises, community adaptation efforts could help catalyse mobilisation. But doesn’t it remain a huge challenge to catalyse mass mobilisation in areas where the effects of climate breakdown are much more geographically widespread and slower to appear?
From the inner lives of individuals and communities to global infrastructure, climate resilience and preparedness can be approached at many different levels, all of which interact with and affect each other. Here we identify six broad leverage points: inner resilience; household ruggedisation; community adaptation; business and sector adaptation; national adaptation; international adaptation.
Inner resilience:
Climate breakdown is psychologically gruelling in myriad ways, and as such should be considered an impact in itself, requiring dedicated support approaches. Conversely, inner and outer resilience depend on collective inner capacities and competencies that can be nurtured and that should be considered a vital part of adaptation. (See also Section 4.)
Household ruggedisation: aka prepping. Among those with sufficient personal resource, prepping may offer short-term resilience to specific impacts such as shortages. However, its most valuable function is to demonstrate its own limits and the need for adaptation at the level of larger groups.
Community: Communities are the smallest units of humanity that can become meaningfully resilient beyond the short term. Historically the collaborative bonds among local communities have been far stronger than in today’s fragmented, digitised society, highlighting vast potential for regenerative practices benefiting both social wellbeing and structural robustness. Community adaptation is a critical focus of the SAFER campaign.
Business and sectoral adaptation (see also Section 4)
National adaptation: SAFER campaign activities include pressure upon the Government to link policy priorities with a foundational need for climate adaptation, implement national adaptation policy, and support devolved measures through adequate funding.
International adaptation: Chiefly, financial and policy support for adaptation in the global South.
Personal adaptation?
A sixth implicit ‘level’ at which adaptation can be undertaken, particularly among ‘early adopter’ readers, is the personal. Within a decarbonisation-centric climate movement, a shift to accepting the need for adaptation is underway, but at a personal level this can bring emotional and ethical difficulty - from fear to guilt, dissonance and denial. Turning constructively towards adaptation may require intention and attention.
Once the turn is achieved, many more questions remain. At what level can (y)our talents and resources best support the monumental task of a global-local turn towards adaptation? Professional activity? Artistic output? Community role? Advocacy? Philanthropy?...
Climate change, climate breakdown, climate emergency, climate chaos, collective action problem, wicked problem, predicament….
Within public climate advocacy, the term ‘climate change’ has long been superseded by stronger alternatives like ‘climate breakdown’, ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate chaos’ that better express the urgency and depth of the challenges facing life on earth.
In systems thinking, climate is often now described as a ‘wicked problem’ and a ‘collective action problem’: however, descriptors including any formulation of the word ‘problem’ still tend to understate its novelty, danger and difficulty.[135] The climate challenge defies straightforward articulation, and requires a complex, costly, and highly disruptive international effort across social, political, economic, technological, and cultural domains. Even if such an effort happened, it would be misleading to suggest that the climate crisis could ever be ‘solved’. We have entered a new unstable condition, permanent within the horizons of the current civilization: a predicament.[136]
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UNFCC (2024) Defining and understanding transformational adaptation at different spatial scales and sectors, and assessing progress in planning and implementing transformational adaptation approaches at the global level. [online] available at: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/tp2024_08.pdf
United Nations Environment Programme (2024) A Decade of Ecosystem-based Adaptation: Lessons from the United Nations Environment Programme - Policy Brief. Available at: https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/45028
University of Exeter (2024). Adaptation Community of Practice - Green Futures Network. [online]
Green Futures Network. Available at:https://gfn.exeter.ac.uk/adaptation-community-of-practice/
Urban, J., Vačkářová, D., & Badura, T. (2021). Climate adaptation and climate mitigation do not undermine each other: A cross-cultural test in four countries. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101658.
WeAdapt (2025) [online] https://weadapt.org/
Wehrmann, B. (2022). Berlin launches ‘heat aid’ programme as govt gauges extreme weather costs. [online] Clean Energy Wire. Available at: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/berlin-launches-heat-aid-programme-govt-gauges-extreme-weather-costs.
Wickramaratne PJ, Yangchen T, Lepow L, Patra BG, Glicksburg B, Talati A, Adekkanattu P, Ryu E, Biernacka JM, Charney A, Mann JJ, Pathak J, Olfson M, Weissman MM. (2022). Social connectedness as a determinant of mental health: A scoping review. PLoS One. 7(10) doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275004.
Wilder Podcast (2025). Grange Project. [online] Grange Project. Available at: https://www.grangeproject.co.uk/wilder-podcast
Working Class Climate Alliance (2023). Who Are We? [online] The WCCA. Available at: https://wccalliance.org/about-us-2/
Vella-Brodrick, D, Slemp, G., & Joshanlo, M. (2022). Longitudinal Relationships Between Social Connection, Agency, and Emotional Well-Being: A 13-Year Study. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 10.1080/17439760.2022.2131609.
For groups who prioritise national pride and understand climate primarily through the lens of local issues, such as ‘Loyal Nationals’ (see Climate Outreach (2024) campaign emphasis on historic efforts towards national resilience in the face of a common threat may potentially generate more appeal than emissions reduction.
[1] See Section 3.1 for definition.
[2] Adaptation has appeal at both ends of the political spectrum - see e.g. Chrobak (2024) and Boyer (2024) - however it is not uncontroversial. Approaches must be context-sensitive and emphasize the needs of local stakeholders - see e.g. Brink et al (2024). See also Section 3.2.
[4] See e.g. Ostrander (2022)
[5] The link between local adaptation and support for ‘mitigation’ has been proposed for 20 years or more in social resilience literature. See e.g. Adger, (2023)
[6] Lara Hansen helpfully describes adaptation as a ‘gateway drug’ for decarbonisation. (Ostrander 2022)
[7] See e.g. FOTE (2024)
[8] See e.g. WeAdapt, a collaborative platform showcasing many global South-led adaptation case-studies. Whatever the temperature shift in the Global north, populations here will have much to learn from others who have been forced to adapt elsewhere.
[9] Global South adaptation leadership is discussed in some detail in Read, Scott & Phillips (2024), alongside the potential leadership role of people displaced by climate impacts.
[10] And even fragilising - actively setting back resilience by e.g. continuing to build in flood-vulnerable areas.
[13] Sections 3, 4 and 5 explore need and approaches in more detail.
[14] (See section 3.)
[16] On precaution see e.g. Read (2016). On All-hazards approach see Allen (2019).
[17] Researchers define soft denial as a tendency to admit the scientific truth of climate damage, divorced from appropriate change in course of action. See e.g. Goldrick-Kelly (2021)
[18]Research demonstrates a dampening effect of techno-optimist narratives on support for mitigation. See e.g. Campbell-Arvai (2017)
[19] Rockstrom describes ‘1.5’ as a planetary boundary. See Harvey (2021).
[20] See e.g. Mann (2017) and Knowlton (2017)
[21] The forthcoming Activating Majorities report from the CMP discusses APAC (Avoid panic at All Costs) messaging in more detail.
[22] Research from the CMP and partners demonstrates citizens’ appetite for truth, even where no ‘solution’ is obvious. See. e.g. Lopatin and Farstad (2023). [k]
[23] CMP’s Climate Courage campaign advocates deliberate measures to support those processing difficult climate realities, building empowering pathways to action. See the relevant theme in Section 4.
[24] See CMP’s upcoming report “mobilising majorities” for detailed analysis. See also Andre et al. (2024).
[25] 52% of Britons harbour fears of collapse. See
[26] See e.g. Greenfield (2024).
[27] See Read (2024).
[28] Consciously or otherwise, a driver of continued faith in 1.5 among policymakers is avoidance of paying for adaptation; particularly in the global South, but also in vulnerable, lower income areas in the global North. See Section 1.9.
[29] See also Carrington (2024).
[30] Grasping the truth about climate requires not only facts but adequate strategies for processing the very difficult emotions that accompany them. The collective work of ‘inner adaptation’ is a vital and neglected dimension of adaptation work and climate action in general. See e.g. Read et al. (2024) chapter 14. See also Sections 3.3, 1.8 and 4.
[31] In turn, this psychological dynamic is crucial to understanding resistance to adaptation.
[32]See Morton (2013)
[33] See Hutchinson (2013).
[35] Those who do feel threat often prefer to leave the solutions to others - the collective action problem: see Section 1.9.
[36] A task in this campaigning space is to sensitively help draw these connections. See Read (2018).
[38] See section 1.4
[39] Lara Hansen helpfully describes adaptation as a ‘gateway drug’ for decarbonisation. (Ostrander 2022)
[40] See e.g. WCCA (2023)
[41]Class-inflected, parodic representation of environmental activism in right-wing media is a well-documented phenomenon. Mckinstry (2019) exemplifies the genre.
[42] A forthcoming report, Climate Popularism, co-authored with Caroline Lucas and Jonathon Porritt, discusses the relationship of climate to populism; from the tendency of Right populism to undermine climate action, to the positive potential of climate-popularism centring adaptation, and realigning environmentalism with the interests of working class and low income groups.
[43] It also leaves people vulnerable to harmful conspiracy theories. See e.g. O’Sullivan (2025).
[44] See e.g. Bell (2020)
[45] Effectively managed, this message could limit the appeal of populist parties such as Reform UK, whose platform emphasises declining living standards. See e.g. Sky (2025)
[46] See also Campaign Activities in Section 5.
[47] To benefit the communities named here, much adaptation must be locally focused. See Section 3.2.
[49] See e.g. Malhotra (2024)
[50] See e.g. Gov.UK (2025)
[52] See e.g. Martinez et al. (2023)
[54] For example the Fossil Fuel-funded US National Center for Policy Analysis wrote in 2005 that "The growing consensus on climate change policies is that adaptation will protect present and future generations from climate-sensitive risks far more than efforts to restrict CO2 emissions." NCPA (2005)
[55] In some heavily impacted areas, defensive / reactive adaptation is already drawing increased funding as other approaches decline. In 2020, California funded wildfire response three times more, and decarbonisation three times less, than in 2015. See Roberts (2024).
[56] For example, the right-wing ‘climate-sceptical’ Australian Government’s (2015) has embraced climate adaptation. Many of their proposals would be at home in this report - however their climate risk management strategy excluded transformative approaches and focused on defensive/reactive adaptation only; in essence an ‘adaptation instead of decarbonisation’ approach.
[57] Especially Party Chair Richard Tice. See e.g. Sethi & Ward 2024
[58] See e.g. Orgad et.al. (2024)
[59] See e.g. Mollison (1988)
[60] See Taleb (2012)
[61] Solnit (2022) explores a human tendency towards spontaneous kindness and resourcefulness in the aftermath of major disasters.
[62] Lisa Schipper, a delegate at multilateral climate negotiations from the 1990s recalls: “more developed countries in the Global North tried to skirt [global South adaptation] discussions out of worry for their own financial liability…anything that would give the impression that they’re responsible, was like, ‘Oh, shut that door.’” See Ostrander (2022)
[64] See NCSR (2024)
[65] Urban greening interventions can produce surprising drops in ambient temperature, making cities far more liveable.
See e.g. Mooney (2025) and Banta & Swain (2024)
[66] See Lebreton (2023)
[67] Prominent climate campaigns have attracted criticism for scolding or dictating to their audience. SAFER aims to soften this image, promoting collaborative, creative resilience efforts.
[68] Although flood defences were included in the 2024 Labour budget, reference to “significant funding pressures” leaves measures open to review ( Carbon Brief (2024)). Although implementation of plans is a local task, a supportive national policy framework and funding is necessary. To reduce flood-funding would be absurd. See CCC (2023) for further recommendations and rationale.
[69] And thus helps reduce polarisation, increasing bipartisan and nonpartisan support for climate action: see e.g. Chrobak (2024).
[70] Includes overcoming the outdated mindset, influential both within the hard Right and in some climate activism, that treats adaptation and decarbonisation as antagonists.
[71] See e.g. Lisa & Schipper (2020)
[72] Furthermore, as discussed in section 1.7, failure to define adaptation risks handing leadership to opportunist political actors.
[73]See also Appendix X - 6 modes of adaptation.
[74] Lisa & Schipper (2020)
[75] See for example Read, Phillips and Scott (2024). For the United Nations official’ definition of transformational adaptation, see UNFCC (2024). See also ‘Appendix III: Notes on Terminology Foster (2019)
[76] For example, by encouraging populations to continue rebuilding in chronically flood- or fire- vulnerable areas.
[77] See e.g. Lozano (2025).
[78] Adaptation focus should be considered a universal ‘backstop’. If adaptation efforts prove inadequate, then the response should be more or different adaptation. For example, should the government fail to produce a National Adaptation plan, a grassroots plan should be developed. If transformative adaptation fails, deep adaptation approaches will be required.
[79] See e.g. Glendon (2025)
[81] See Laybourn (2023)
[82] See e.g. (Bristow et al. 2022)
[83] See e.g. Cunsolo et al. (2020)
[84] See e.g. Clayton et al. (2017)
[85] The CMP’s Climate Courage campaign aims to raise the profile of this need and build resource in this area. See section 4.
[86] See e.g. Vella-Brodrick et al. (2022)
[87] See e.g. Wickmanarante et al (2022)
[89] See e.g. Hosking (2020) and Wilder Podcast (2025)
[90]See also ‘Ecosystem-based adaptation’; a key dimension of TrAd. UNEP (2024)
[93] Mindfulness practice has found the mainstream throughout the recent decade, and there is great interest within the teaching community to tailor training to respond to the climate crisis - both in terms of eco-anxiety and supporting people to understand their role in the transition. Important innovations include the inner Green Deal’s Mindfulness-based sustainable transformation.
[94] Beyond ‘obvious’ therapeutic approaches. the category of activities that support resilience to anxiety and grief, and help people to express or cope with their feelings is extremely broad. From creative expression such as making music, dancing, writing or martial arts, to community work, time in nature, or even gathering around a fire.
[95] Another graduate of the CMP incubator, the ‘General Counsel Sustainability Forum’ explicitly promotes an adaptation agenda to business GCs. See GCSF (2021).
[96] For example, wildfire-resistant roofing.
[97] See Read et al. (2024)
[99] See FFCC (2023)
[101]For example, Postcode Revolution and Community Climate Action have demonstrated the potential for adaptation-aware, food-centric initiatives.
[102] For example, the public profile of Transition has declined in recent years.
[103] Coming impacts will likely force a general shift away from globalisation and towards subsidiarity, with mutual aid in the case of major disasters likely becoming one of the few remaining instances of globalised supply. Relocalisation and reduction of long supply lines represent a ‘win-win-win’, reducing vulnerability and emissions at the same time as well as re-establishing more local knowledge and control). See e.g. Lang (2020)
[104] Cultural institutions with loyal followings and an ecological element - such as the BBC’s Gardener’s World and Country File - increasingly cover climate breakdown and nature depletion, and should be encouraged to further promote adaptation awareness, particularly regarding the possibility of a vicious cooling phase. Gardener’s World already covers garden-adaptation to overheating, but has yet to comment on uncertainty, as per Section 1.
[105] See Lucas 2024
[106] See Laybourn et al. (2019)
[107] See Sharpe (2023)
[109] For example, Labour’s plan to decarbonise electricity must be adequately resilient against climate impacts. Currently, present and future pylons and other electrical infrastructure (central to Labour’s mission on decarbonising electricity supply) are not hardened or prepared against the possibility of a collapse in the SPG or AMOC.
[111] See e.g. Met Office (2024)
[112] See e.g. Mackie (2024)
[113] Among key motivations for including Cadence Roundtable in the CMP incubator was its unusual commitment to convening the adaptation space.
[115] See e.g. Moloney (2024)
[116] See e.g. Edmond (2023)
[117] See e.g. Wehrmann (2022)
[118] See e.g. Read and Eastoe (2023)
[119] Transformative Adaptation will integrate hard engineering solutions where appropriate within broader wholistic response, with less reflex-adoption of hard engineering ‘solutions’.
[120]See e.g. McGilchrist (2021)
[121]For example, Moral Imaginations is an initiative dedicated to mobilising imagination for collective decision making.
[122] Adaptation visioning is an exercise that could be encouraged in any community as a group activity.
[123] See e.g. Scully & Shalant (2023) and UNDP (2024)
[126] UK Covid 19 enquiry (2024)
[128]See e.g. Boyer (2024) Chrobak (2024) and Fisher (2024).
[130] See Lucas (2024)
[132] Many areas of the UK are increasingly at risk from wildfires - for which, as the CCC recently pointed out, we are dismally ill-prepared.
[133] See e.g. Read (2024b)
[134] See also IPPR (2024). Material on cold risk and AMOC vulnerability is forthcoming in 2025 from CMP, in partnership with Laurie Laybourn.
[135] We welcome discussion of suitable terms/frames. Exploration of framing challenges will continue in forthcoming work.
[136] See Goldthorpe (2023) and Hine (2023)
[a]?
[b]Not sure this makes sense?
[c]slightly odd phrase? having said that, struggling to think of an alternative! maybe repeat level again - 'the minimum level with any prospect of self-reliance?
[d]I like that.
[e]I took this term from Joe Brewer, and I like the way it dismantles the idea of the individual as something that makes sense on its own.
[f]Link to HEART website is not working so I have:
- let Kimberly Hare @ HEART know
- swapped the link out and replaced it with one that goes directly to the Postcode Revolution website.
Trust ok.
[g]STARTEGIC?
[h]Strategic?
[i]Strategic?
[j]Not sure I understand this point...
[k]The link is to a 2023 report