Climate Breakdown, Adaptation – and the Green Party Conference

In my recent article for Bright Green, How we deliver strategic adaptation for emergency resilience, I set out why humanity’s failure to halt environmental destruction stems from a ‘wicked’ collective action problem – and how we can still change course.
 
My argument is simple: we need to put adaptation at the centre of climate strategy.

• Climate impacts are already here in the UK and across the globe. Communities are unprepared, and governments are failing to act.
• Locally led adaptation – from home retrofits to peatland restoration – both protects people and cuts emissions.
• Adaptation builds resilience not just in our infrastructure, but in our communities and inner lives. Stronger relationships, trust, and mutual care are essential if we are to withstand climate shocks.
• Done badly, adaptation risks being shallow, reactive, and counter-productive. Done well, it is transformative: regenerative, low-carbon, and depolarising.

Read the full article here.
 
This is also the work of the Climate Majority Project’s SAFER campaign: shifting adaptation from the margins to the mainstream of climate advocacy.
 
And this is why I’m delighted to be chairing a major panel at the Green Party Conference in Bournemouth, 9am on Saturday morning. If you are there, I hope you’ll join us for what I believe is one of the most important conversations of our time!