Adaptation Isn’t Backing Down – It’s Stepping Up - resilience
By Rupert Read, originally published by Resilience.org
November 12, 2025
COP30 is underway. It’s being called the ‘Adaptation COP’—the moment when the world finally faces the need to live within a changed climate. But let’s be honest: humanity isn’t preparing for crisis anymore. We’re already living through it.
Hurricane Melissa, the devastating floods across Europe and Asia, the scorched harvests that have sent food prices soaring—these aren’t warnings; they’re the new normal. The climate emergency is no longer arriving. It’s here.
When António Guterres declared recently that the 1.5°C goal is “dead,” it punctured the last illusions of safety. The message is brutally simple: we either pay for adaptation now, or we pay for collapse later. (Or perhaps both.) There is no third option. Finance and prioritisation versus catastrophe—that’s the real negotiation at COP30.
In the UK, elements of what we might call incipient collapse are already visible. The government’s own Climate Change Committee has warned that the vast majority of adaptation plans are stalled or nonexistent. Baroness Brown, who chairs the Committee’s adaptation sub-group, has said plainly that Britain is “not yet adapted for the changes we’re already living with.” Flooding, heatwaves, and food insecurity are no longer distant risks—they are stresses on our infrastructure today.
Our buildings, roads, hospitals, and farms were built for a climate that no longer exists. Over 80% of British farmers have expressed serious concern about the viability of future harvests under shifting weather patterns. The NHS struggles under extreme heat events, yet hospitals themselves overheat. Our housing stock leaks both energy and cool air. This is not resilience; it’s fragility disguised as normality.
And yet, ministers continue to equate clean-energy investment with climate readiness—as though decarbonisation were the same thing as adaptation. It isn’t. ‘Mitigation’ is of course essential; it cuts emissions and helps slow the worsening of the crisis, eventually potentially cutting it off at source. But adaptation is what keeps societies standing as that crisis unfolds. One without the other is a recipe for failure.
Adaptation must now be treated as a matter of national security—as defending the very infrastructure and social fabric upon which lives depend. That means flood-proof housing, heat-resilient schools, water systems that can cope with both drought and deluge, and local recovery networks capable of rapid, community-led response. It means thinking in decades, not electoral cycles. But it also means thinking with the calm urgency of our shared, growing human need.
Investing in adaptation isn’t a luxury or an act of resignation. It’s a sober act of realism and responsibility. It’s economic self-defence, and moral duty. To underinvest now is to knowingly leave citizens exposed to foreseeable harm. Anything less would be a profound dereliction of duty.
And given that that dereliction of duty is underway, transformative, strategic and deep adaptations are meanwhile thrust upon every neighbourhood and household as how we get to get through what is coming, together. Unless and until government steps up.
Adaptation isn’t backing down. It isn’t “giving up.”
It’s showing up.
It’s stepping up.
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Thanks to Sam Bowen for vital editorial help, and to Caroline Lucas for discussion.
For the Climate Majority Project’s latest report, on which this thinking is based, ‘We need to talk about adaptation’, which Rupert Read and Sam Bowen co-authored on (with Caroline Lucas writing the Foreword), Go to usercontent.one .
You can hear Rupert and and Simon Evans discussing the “adaptation COP” on the New Scientist podcast here: newscientist.com |
