Leaning Against the Wind or Sailing with It?

Global warming or climatic change rests on two main strategies: mitigation and adaptation. Both raise some important issues such as monitoring the relation between a society and its environment. Does the transition from one stage to the next denote a “normal” gradation in monitoring “our” relationship with the environment or does it mean an inflexion, even a rupture, of it? To answer this question, we will provide further clarification on both strategies to identify their similarities and their differences. Mitigation as adaptation goes together with the recognition of climate change. While mitigation aims for the preservation of our current climate stakes, adaptation works on the degradation of the current climate. In this perspective, mitigation and adaptation are linked in time as a logical succession. Nevertheless, their relationship isn’t such evident because of the uncertainty surrounding adaptation. If mitigation works on the reduction of the greenhouse gases, the goal of adaptation stays obscure: “Who should adapt and which direction should be taken?” Mitigation’s strategy clearly aims for a stable stage while adaptation goes together with the idea of perpetual change. It integrates the principle of climate change. This distinction matches an inflexion of “our” relationship with global issues such as climate change. Mitigation keeps the myths of struggle going while adaptation breaks with this imaginary. Adaptation opts for a new horizon, a new frame that fits, depending of how you look at it, with a certain sense of reality or for helplessness. Does adaptation signify that “we give up the fight” or does it rise of a new maturity, less ambitious in its goals but much more ambitious in its approaches? This is the question we would love to kick in the discussion.