Adaptation

History Suggests Inequality Ends In Catastrophe

May 19, 2026 Jeremy Lent, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, Crisis, History, Inequality, social transformation

There may never have been a group that had it so good as the Japanese plutocrats of the 1930s. In that era, the richest one percent of Japanese society captured twenty percent of national income — a third more than the top earners in America command today. Within a decade, however, most of that bounty had vanished. Their share of national income collapsed by more than two-thirds; the value of their estates fell by 98 percent. What happened? Total war, total defeat, and foreign occupation. Mass mobilization forced the state to intervene in industrial production, double income taxes, restrict dividends, and requisition merchant ships.

Transition Towns Are Key To Degrowth; Current Movements Are Too Reformist

May 5, 2026 Ted Trainer, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, climate crisis, Degrowth, Sustainability, Transition Towns

Resources are dwindling, including minerals, timber, water, and soils. Almost all ecosystems are being damaged, including the atmosphere, oceans, and forests. Species are being lost at an alarming rate. Seven of the nine major “planetary boundaries” impacts have now exceeded safe levels. The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) “Footprint” measure shows that Australians today are using five to seven times the per capita amount of productive land that would be available to all in 2050. Then there are the social and cultural effects. Inequality is rising, and social cohesion is decaying.

Boston Has A Plan For Sea Level Rise; What Next?

May 5, 2026 Courtney Humphries, Next City. Strategize! Adaptation, Boston, climate crisis, Sea level rise, Urban Design

If you’ve flown into Boston’s airport or explored its downtown, chances are you’ve stood on land that was once underwater in the city’s history and that is projected to be flooded in the future. The city has more made land than any other in North America: It added 5,250 acres of new land throughout its history, amounting to one-sixth of its current land area. Boston boldly refashioned its own geography by creating low-lying land, but in doing so has left some of the city’s most economically important neighborhoods and infrastructure vulnerable to flooding with sea level rise.

Rethinking Resilience In A Time Of Polycrisis

April 9, 2026 Jem Bendell, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, collapse, Inflation, New Normal, Transformation

I’ve often said that a rising cost of living is the obvious way that most people will experience the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies. In the decade prior to 2026, that was already happening due to market capture by monopolistic capital, corrupt monetary policies, and the damage to production from ecological depletion and climate destabilisation. Now it’s also happening due to avoidable conflicts, such as in Ukraine and the Gulf. That is not to downplay any one tragic situation; but by pointing to the rising prices which then necessitate a change in our living standards, emotional states, and life goals, I am trying to help more of us to see how collapse is not a sudden event in the future.

2025 Must Be The End Of Inane Rule Of Climate ‘Optimism’

December 29, 2025 Rupert Read, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, climate crisis, Decarbonisation, Extinction Rebellion

Allow yourself a very brief thought-experiment… What if 2025 had been the year the UK finally met its legally binding commitment to eliminate dangerous carbon emissions?… What if the mass climate mobilisations of the late 2010s had succeeded in forcing governments to act at the speed science demanded? In that alternate reality, life would almost certainly feel calmer, safer and more predictable than it does now. As 2025 draws to a close, however, we are confronted by a harder truth. Britain is nowhere near zero carbon.

Why We Need To Talk About Adaptation

October 28, 2025 Rupert Read, DeSmog. Strategize! Adaptation, climate crisis, COP30, net zero

I’m delighted to be writing today as the co-author of a new report called ‘We need to talk about adaptation’. This report is co-produced by the Climate Majority Project and the Glacier Trust (a leading adaptation-action NGO, mainly active in the global South). What we did together is investigate how much the biggest environmental organisations are talking about (and what they are doing about) climate adaptation now, in 2025. And here is the interesting bit: the same analysis was conducted in 2020. So we were able to compare then with now.

Coming Soon To A Country Near You: The Not-So-Subtle Shift To Adaptation?

October 24, 2024 Erik Assadourian, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, Capitalism, Environment, Resilience, Sustainability

he shift to adaptation is coming. And when it comes it will be Earth-shaking—where collectively, those with resources start to give up the struggle to stop climate change, and instead focus primarily on protecting their own proverbial asses. Fortunately, we’re not quite there yet. In fact, returning to the report The Wall Street Journal mischaracterized, mitigation finance is growing far faster than adaptation finance, reaching $1.3 trillion annually in 2021-2022, double the $653 billion averaged in 2019-2020. Adaptation finance, on the other hand, grew to $63 billion, a 28% increase year-on-year, but because mitigation finance grew much more, adaptation finance dropped from 7% to 5% of the total.

Opening A New Path On Climate And The Future

December 30, 2023 Gus Speth, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, Capitalism, climate crisis, Transformation

Of the many climate struggles going on today, the great one, played out in hundreds of arenas around the world, is the struggle to rein in and then halt the buildup of greenhouse gases. Gaining ever-more attention is the struggle to adapt to the climate impacts already upon us. But there is a new struggle that needs to be joined now: the struggle to learn from our mistakes — the Big Mistake of climate catastrophe. What is it about our society, our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen? What is it that has led us to this tragedy? There are a set of readily available answers to this question, the conventional wisdom of the matter.

Putting Indigenous Knowledge Into Practice For Climate Change

November 19, 2022 Jessica Milgroom, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, climate crisis, Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous people developed deep knowledge about their environment that they built through relationships with land and with place over hundreds and often thousands of years. They have learned how to live off the gifts of the earth and take care of them so that they will be healthy for many generations to come. This knowledge offers another way of seeing and understanding the world, one that is necessary to address climate change. Now scientists, governments and communities are finally recognizing that taking action to adapt to climate change is urgent and an increasing number of people are looking to indigenous knowledge for insight. If you live in a place where indigenous knowledge has been buried under centuries of colonial culture, the idea that you could use it to adapt to climate change may feel vague.

High-Profile Paper On ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Impacts

August 11, 2022 David Spratt, Resilience. Educate! Adaptation, climate crisis, Extreme weather, Sustainability

So what does this new paper say? Well, in essence, some very similar things to our report What Lies Beneath: The underestimation of existential climate risks, written with my Breakthrough colleague Ian Dunlop. When that report was first published in 2017, and then expanded in 2018 with a foreword by Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, it had a significant impact, especially in Europe, with German and Slovenian translations, and a front-cover interview with the German energy magazine, Energiewende Magazin (translation here). It was a key document in the successful campaign to have the Club of Rome adopt a climate emergency position, and its subsequent advocacy which morphed into its Planetary Emergency campaign.

New IPCC Report – Time Is Running Out To Adapt To Climate Change

February 28, 2022 Joseph Winters and Lina Tran, Grist. Educate! Adaptation, climate crisis, Environment, IPCC

Scientists have long warned that time is of the essence to stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Now, in a new international report released on Monday, they argue the clock is also ticking on efforts to adapt to the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising seas, scorching wildfires, and devastating droughts already jeopardize billions of people worldwide — these, and other climate impacts, are expected to get much worse over the coming decades. “Any further delay” in global action, the report says, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” The new report is the second of three parts of the latest global assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a body of leading climate experts from around the world.

When To Build Sea Walls

January 9, 2022 Robert Hunziker, Counterpunch. Create! Adaptation, climate crisis, Sea level rise, Sea Walls

During the month of December 2021 two warnings of impending sea level rise were issued by highly respected groups of climate scientists. These are professional scientists who do not deal in hyperbole. Rather, they are archetypical conservative serious-minded scientists who follow the facts. The most recent warning on December 30th is of deteriorating conditions at the Arctic and Greenland. The second warning is the threatening collapse in Antarctica of one of the largest glaciers in the world. As these events unfortunately coincide so close together, one at the top of the world, the other at the bottom, should coastal cities plan to build sea walls? The scale of time and material and costs to build seawalls is nearly overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming.

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