Is Climate Adaptation the New Common Ground?

In partnership with IMechE, join us and a multi-disciplinary panel of climate experts during London Climate Action Week (LCAW) as we unpack the global policy shift from climate mitigation to climate adaptation and debate its ramifications.

Climate mitigation has become increasingly difficult terrain. The rightward political drift across much of Europe and North America, the fracturing of international climate coalitions, and a growing perception that net zero has become ideologically freighted have made ambitious mitigation commitments harder to sustain – and in some contexts harder to defend publicly.

Adaptation offers something different. Because it deals with what is already happening – the flooding, the heat, the infrastructure failures, the insurance gaps – it sidesteps much of that ideological friction. The case for adaptation does not depend on agreement about its causes, which means it can command support across political divides that have made mitigation increasingly difficult to discuss. But that shift deserves scrutiny. If adaptation becomes a substitute narrative rather than a complement to mitigation, a world that has stopped trying to limit warming is one that will have far more than 3°C to adapt to.

Set against the backdrop of the CCC's landmark A Well-Adapted UK report, published just weeks before this session, this debate brings together Martin Townsend of BSI as chair; Dr Ollie Wing, Chief Scientist at Fathom; Professor Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University and the CCC's Adaptation Committee; Mason Durant, Senior Scientist at HR Wallingford; Doogie Black, CEO of Climate Sense; and Dr Jolyne Sanjak, Team Leader of FCDO Land Facility Programme at Tetra Tech.  

With a panel spanning climate science, flood risk modelling, engineering standards, international delivery and organisational resilience, this event is designed to be a genuine debate, not a consensus exercise.