Sustainable development and climate change: Beyond mitigation and adaptation

This Viewpoint article reviews the two approaches to climate change, namely mitigation and adaptation, and examines the complex interrelationships between them, and between climate change and sustainable development. Adaptation is about reducing the effects of climate change on both human and natural systems; and mitigation is about reducing the causes of climate change by decreasing the anthropogenic impact on the climate system. The implications of an apparently warming world clearly mean that there is need for mitigation; but how effective will mitigation be, and how far are we prepared to go, to reconcile conflicting interests and tensions? Despite relatively slow progress, some forms of sustainable development have appeared, and these offer the best hope we have of mitigating human contribution to climate change, and adapting to its consequences. However, it is also necessary to view the issue of climate change as holistically as possible, whereby socio-economic objectives, needs and desires are reconciled with environmental limits, because science and technology are limited in their capacity to solve problems on a planetary scale.