Throughout the past few decades, discussions about how to address climate change have become dominated by two broad categories of response: adaptation, or adjusting to the realities of a warmer, more volatile planet; and mitigation, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent further warming. Mitigation was once the preferred approach, emphasizing the moral responsibility of humanity to prevent environmental catastrophe, but in recent years, adaptation has taken center stage as a seemingly pragmatic alternative.
The shift toward adaptation was not accidental. Rather, it reflects a deeper unwillingness within wealthy nations to disrupt entrenched economic systems built on fossil fuels and consumerism. Influenced by misinformation, political inertia, and vested interests, global leaders gradually reframed climate change as something to be managed rather than prevented. This logic suggested we could build higher flood defenses, breed drought-resistant crops, or relocate populations from increasingly uninhabitable regions — effectively normalizing the idea of retreat as acceptable policy.
But this supposed pragmatism has always rested on troubling assumptions. It was easier to advocate adaptation when its most severe consequences occurred far from the political and economic power centers of the Global North. For decades, communities in countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique, and the Marshall Islands were treated as unfortunate but acceptable losses, collateral damage of a changing climate that richer nations felt was too costly to seriously address.
This selective concern is not without precedent: History offers powerful analogies for how distant suffering is rationalized when it threatens the comfort of the powerful. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously described Czechoslovakia as “a far away country between people of whom we know nothing,” rationalizing appeasement with the Nazi regime that led to catastrophic consequences. Today, the Global South is often similarly abstracted in the climate discourse, relegated to the periphery of global consciousness despite bearing the brunt of climate-driven devastation.
The Marshall Islands exemplify this harsh reality. Parts of the country are already disappearing beneath rising seas, forcing residents to confront the possibility of permanent displacement. Here, adaptation does not mean improving infrastructure or changing agricultural practices — it means the loss of an ancestral homeland. This stark reality, however, has rarely moved richer nations to reconsider their approach.
For decades, communities in countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique, and the Marshall Islands were treated as unfortunate but acceptable losses.
Yet climate disasters increasingly refuse to respect national boundaries or socioeconomic privilege. Floods in Germany and Belgium in 2021, severe droughts across central and southern Europe, and the unprecedented 2022 heatwave in the U.K. underscore the vulnerability of even wealthy societies. In the United States, cities like Miami and New Orleans grapple with the real possibility of becoming partially abandoned due to rising sea levels, while persistent wildfires in California have turned annual evacuations into a grim routine.
These impacts in wealthier nations reveal a fundamental hypocrisy. If richer countries adhered to the same logic they’ve advocated globally, they’d now openly accept retreat from their own lands. Yet this conversation remains taboo among wealthy elites. Instead, adaptation has become a tool to manage and postpone politically uncomfortable realities rather than confront the deeper roots of environmental breakdown.
Moreover, recent research highlights the profound long-term health consequences of adaptation-based responses. One extensive study examining data from 300 million hospitalizations across eight countries found significantly elevated hospitalizations related to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, and other ailments lasting months after major flooding events. Such evidence underscores that adaptation alone fails to address the cascading human health crises that climate change triggers.
Economically, relying solely on adaptation perpetuates existing inequalities by disproportionately placing the burden of climate impacts on poorer communities and countries. Wealthy nations can often afford infrastructure upgrades, insurance schemes, and temporary economic supports to cushion the impacts of climate disruption, but these options are rarely available to poorer regions, which have historically contributed least to the climate crisis yet suffer the most severe consequences. This dynamic exacerbates global inequality and instability, underscoring the ethical necessity of addressing the roots of climate injustice rather than merely managing its symptoms.
When mitigation enters the conversation about solutions to the climate crisis, it is often conflated with technological solutions like renewable energy and carbon capture. While these can help, they also often replicate the extractive, destructive mindset underpinning the climate crisis. Large-scale solar and wind projects, for example, have led to the displacement of Indigenous communities in regions such as Oaxaca, Mexico, where land was appropriated for energy development without proper consultation or consent. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of lithium mining — crucial for electric vehicle batteries — has strained water resources in areas like Chile’s Atacama Desert, threatening fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of local populations. These cases are reminders that the transition to a low-carbon economy, if pursued uncritically, can perpetuate environmental degradation and deepen social injustice.
If we genuinely care about a livable future, we must confront uncomfortable truths rather than retreat into illusions of adaptation.
History illustrates clearly that technological interventions alone cannot resolve social and political challenges. Just as nuclear weapons did not abolish the underlying tensions that drive conflict, adaptation and “green” technologies alone cannot rectify the exploitative relationship between industrial civilization and the natural world.
If we genuinely care about a livable future, we must confront uncomfortable truths rather than retreat into illusions of adaptation. It requires fundamentally reassessing our economic and social systems, moving beyond mere crisis management toward genuine environmental and social justice through approaches like degrowth. Mitigation, grounded in ethical responsibility and collective action, must reclaim its place at the center of the climate conversation. Otherwise, adaptation will become little more than a euphemism for abandonment — not just of vulnerable communities, but of our collective humanity.
Peter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist and lecturer (assistant professor) in climate and development at the University of Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute. He is the author of the books “Visions of Development” and “Educating for the Anthropocene,” and coauthor of the forthcoming “Reimagining Development” (Oxford University Press, 2025).
