(Image: Private Media)

COP26 in Glasgow has four core areas of discussion: securing net zero; adaptation; mobilising finance; “work together”. The second — adaptation –is perhaps the most concrete, but also the least discussed.

According to the official program, discussions of adaptation will revolve around working together to enable and encourage countries affected by climate change to:

  • protect and restore ecosystems
  • build defences, warning systems and resilient infrastructure and agriculture to avoid loss of homes, livelihoods and even lives.

The first point to note about this is that adaptation is important even when we take aggressive action to reduce emissions. In the language of economics, emissions reduction and adaptation are complements not substitutes — doing more of one makes it easier to do more of the other. It’s going to be a lot easier to successfully build resilient infrastructure and agriculture if climate change is less bad than predicted. And there will be more bang for the buck in working towards net zero if we can adapt more effectively to the effect of climate change from which we can’t escape.

The second point is that it’s useful to distinguish between “adaptation” and “mitigation”. No lesser a scientific authority than NASA observed that adaptation can best be described as:

Adapting to life in a changing climate. [This] involves adjusting to actual or expected future climate. The goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the harmful effects of climate change (like sea-level encroachment, more intense extreme weather events or food insecurity).

By contrast, mitigation is reducing climate change itself. As NASA says, this “involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests and soil)”.

Part of the goal of mitigation is to stabilise accumulated greenhouse-gas levels so that natural adaptation can take place — or at least be less severely impacted.

Now these are conceptually different things. But distinguishing between them also points to things that countries like Australia should do differently. Parts of the country are clearly affected by changing weather patterns. Bushfires wrought havoc just before COVID-19 hit. Droughts have been devastating — and increasingly so. The Great Barrier Reef is under grave threat. Whatever the cause, we can and must do more to reduce the effects of climate change.

When it comes to mitigation — stablising greenhouse-gas levels — Australia has a relatively little known but important scientific advantage.

The world’s oceans hold 25 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and all living plants and animals combined. Oceans used to hold even more carbon. This raises the intriguing possibility of using technology to boost oceans’ capacity to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere.

If we want to get to net zero emissions then having significant negative emissions technologies (NETs) is crucial. Here’s where Australia’s comparative advantage comes in. We are the main gateway to the Southern Ocean, which is the global marine environment with the greatest potential for carbon capture. And a group of Australian and international researchers at the Centre of Innovation for Recovery of Climate Change, Australia (CIRCA) is leading a long-run initiative to develop and deploy these technologies. (Disclosure: I am a member of CIRCA.)

The idea behind ocean NETs is to manipulate algal production rates, use inorganic ocean chemistry, and develop “sea-water splitting” to release hydrogen as a fuel and capture carbon dioxide. The basic science of this is well understood, but research on how to scale and deploy these technologies responsibly is crucial.

Australia is at the global frontier of this work.

Then there’s taking advantage of any potential upsides of a warmer climate, like longer growing seasons and increased crop yields. That’s not to say (as certain conservative, climate denialist former prime ministers of Australia have) that these potential benefits outweigh the costs of climate change. Just that we should take what we can get from climate change — in part to help defray the cost of dealing with the downsides.

Australia has a lot of work to do — and, frankly, diplomatic ground to make up — when it comes to climate change. But it’s worth remembering that although we might not be under the kind of threat that countries like Tuvalu or Bangladesh are from rising sea levels, we have already experienced the devastating effects of climate change.

We can and must adapt. And we are also well positioned — both geographically and scientifically — to lead efforts in mitigating these effects.