Erb alum, Elise Hunter’s (’13) blog on GreenBiz dives into climate adaptation vs. mitigation, its impact on the supply chain and the importance of community.
“The goal of climate mitigation is to limit the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, either by cutting emissions or by enhancing sinks. The inputs of this equation, as varied as they may be, can be distilled into a common set of units, with carbon dioxide equivalent (C02e) as the most well known. Climate adaptation must address a range of climate change effects, from severe storms to sea level rise to droughts. Because many climate change effects will occur in the future, both the nature and the magnitude of these problems are still relatively unknown. Unlike climate mitigation, it is difficult to frame climate adaptation around one quantifiable unit. ”