Abstract:

The damage from wildfires and hurricanes in recent years has resulted in extensive emergency and longer-term responses. This Article identifies an overlooked and inconvenient truth about these types of disasters: many climate adaptation efforts should also achieve climate mitigation. This is not a popular conclusion. Scientists have recognized the importance of the adaptationmitigation nexus for over a decade, but the climate change legal literature typically treats adaptation (adjusting to or reducing the harm of climate change) and mitigation (reducing the causes of anthropogenic climate change) as discrete alternatives. Adaptation will often occur in the midst of short-term emergency responses in which achieving mitigation is far from the minds of policymakers, and including mitigation in long-term adaptation planning could create bureaucratic obstacles that bog down decision-making. Yet future generations will ask whether we accounted for their well-being as we responded to protect the well-being of the current generation or whether we dismissed these concerns and made future disasters worse. The Article argues that adaptation scholarship and policies should reflect the fact that reducing climate risks will often be far more difficult and expensive if mitigation opportunities are missed. As a first step, the Article offers two principles to guide research and policymaking on this topic: mitigate-while-adapting and adapt-to-mitigate. The Article explores the basis for these principles and their implications for public and private governance.