Conor here: The following piece highlights how adaptation and technological solutions to the climate crisis are snake oil and argues instead for degrowth. If it weren’t for the Trump tariffs hitting the poorest the hardest, it might be worth cheering them on as it would lead to degrowth—at least for a time. Alas, he is already starting to back down, and there isn’t any momentum behind any other degrowth policies. So what’s to be done?
By Peter Sutoris, an environmental anthropologist and lecturer (assistant professor) in climate and development at the University of Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute. He is the author of the books “Visions of Development” and “Educating for the Anthropocene,” and coauthor of the forthcoming “Reimagining Development” (Oxford University Press, 2025). Originally published at Undark.
Throughout the past few decades, discussions about how to address climate change have become dominated by two broad categories of response: adaptation, or adjusting to the realities of a warmer, more volatile planet; and mitigation, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent further warming. Mitigation was once the preferred approach, emphasizing the moral responsibility of humanity to prevent environmental catastrophe, but in recent years, adaptation has taken center stage as a seemingly pragmatic alternative.
The shift toward adaptation was not accidental. Rather, it reflects a deeper unwillingness within wealthy nations to disrupt entrenched economic systems built on fossil fuels and consumerism. Influenced by misinformation, political inertia, and vested interests, global leaders gradually reframed climate change as something to be managed rather than prevented. This logic suggested we could build higher flood defenses, breed drought-resistant crops, or relocate populations from increasingly uninhabitable regions — effectively normalizing the idea of retreat as acceptable policy.
But this supposed pragmatism has always rested on troubling assumptions. It was easier to advocate adaptation when its most severe consequences occurred far from the political and economic power centers of the Global North. For decades, communities in countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique, and the Marshall Islands were treated as unfortunate but acceptable losses, collateral damage of a changing climate that richer nations felt was too costly to seriously address.
This selective concern is not without precedent: History offers powerful analogies for how distant suffering is rationalized when it threatens the comfort of the powerful. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously described Czechoslovakia as “a far away country between people of whom we know nothing,” rationalizing appeasement with the Nazi regime that led to catastrophic consequences. Today, the Global South is often similarly abstracted in the climate discourse, relegated to the periphery of global consciousness despite bearing the brunt of climate-driven devastation.
The Marshall Islands exemplify this harsh reality. Parts of the country are already disappearing beneath rising seas, forcing residents to confront the possibility of permanent displacement. Here, adaptation does not mean improving infrastructure or changing agricultural practices — it means the loss of an ancestral homeland. This stark reality, however, has rarely moved richer nations to reconsider their approach.
Yet climate disasters increasingly refuse to respect national boundaries or socioeconomic privilege. Floods in Germany and Belgium in 2021, severe droughts across central and southern Europe, and the unprecedented 2022 heatwave in the U.K. underscore the vulnerability of even wealthy societies. In the United States, cities like Miami and New Orleans grapple with the real possibility of becoming partially abandoned due to rising sea levels, while persistent wildfires in California have turned annual evacuations into a grim routine.
These impacts in wealthier nations reveal a fundamental hypocrisy. If richer countries adhered to the same logic they’ve advocated globally, they’d now openly accept retreat from their own lands. Yet this conversation remains taboo among wealthy elites. Instead, adaptation has become a tool to manage and postpone politically uncomfortable realities rather than confront the deeper roots of environmental breakdown.
Moreover, recent research highlights the profound long-term health consequences of adaptation-based responses. One extensive study examining data from 300 million hospitalizations across eight countries found significantly elevated hospitalizations related to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, and other ailments lasting months after major flooding events. Such evidence underscores that adaptation alone fails to address the cascading human health crises that climate change triggers.
Economically, relying solely on adaptation perpetuates existing inequalities by disproportionately placing the burden of climate impacts on poorer communities and countries. Wealthy nations can often afford infrastructure upgrades, insurance schemes, and temporary economic supports to cushion the impacts of climate disruption, but these options are rarely available to poorer regions, which have historically contributed least to the climate crisis yet suffer the most severe consequences. This dynamic exacerbates global inequality and instability, underscoring the ethical necessity of addressing the roots of climate injustice rather than merely managing its symptoms.
When mitigation enters the conversation about solutions to the climate crisis, it is often conflated with technological solutions like renewable energy and carbon capture. While these can help, they also often replicate the extractive, destructive mindset underpinning the climate crisis. Large-scale solar and wind projects, for example, have led to the displacement of Indigenous communities in regions such as Oaxaca, Mexico, where land was appropriated for energy development without proper consultation or consent. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of lithium mining — crucial for electric vehicle batteries — has strained water resources in areas like Chile’s Atacama Desert, threatening fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of local populations. These cases are reminders that the transition to a low-carbon economy, if pursued uncritically, can perpetuate environmental degradation and deepen social injustice.
History illustrates clearly that technological interventions alone cannot resolve social and political challenges. Just as nuclear weapons did not abolish the underlying tensions that drive conflict, adaptation and “green” technologies alone cannot rectify the exploitative relationship between industrial civilization and the natural world.
If we genuinely care about a livable future, we must confront uncomfortable truths rather than retreat into illusions of adaptation. It requires fundamentally reassessing our economic and social systems, moving beyond mere crisis management toward genuine environmental and social justice through approaches like degrowth. Mitigation, grounded in ethical responsibility and collective action, must reclaim its place at the center of the climate conversation. Otherwise, adaptation will become little more than a euphemism for abandonment — not just of vulnerable communities, but of our collective humanity.
I’d argue that the less we humans manage to mitigate the more we will fail to adapt.
We need to be doing both asap.
To be a bit more concrete, the more we fail to mitigate, the more habitat loss, premature deaths and higher risk of more extinctions (for all life, including humans – and including the wealthy!). Failure to mitigate means our adaptation work will be implausibly large. Most of life on earth will be gone, possibly inducing all humans, certainly most humans.
We have, or soon will set in motion, many positive feedback loops in the environment. So many that we and our decendents will be looking at much higher releases of greenhouse gases that will make our own massive contributions seem small. I’ve read there is far more carbon, both co2 and ch4, frozen in the arctic than humans have thus far added to the earth’s atmosphere. We need to mitigate now so we don’t have to adapt to nlevels of chage caused for ecample by Artic amplification, melting permafrost and methane hydrates, the cloud hypothesis to name a few.
Given the power structure in the world, it is infeasible that degrowth will be voluntarily chosen as it would hit those with power the hardest (and they can afford to adapt). My SWAG – we will leave it to Nature to impose degrowth with the aristocracy fighting every step for their perogative (as always).
Thanks for this article, Conor. I would add to its arguments the point that degrowth is coming regardless of what we do. Consider property insurance, for example. As disasters increase in spread and severity, more and more areas will become uninsurable. What will happen to real estate values on the Gulf Coast if another couple of hurricanes hit it this season? What about any property located in woods west of the Mississippi? For that matter, as fires rage again in the Tri-state area, any wooded area east of the Mississippi looks iffy.
We could act like a grown-up society and admit that we’ve trashed the environment with 50 years of McMansions and seeing the USA in our Chevrolets. We could acknowledge that we’ve changed the Earth; now the Earth is going to change us, our children, our grandchildren, our culture, our economy, our worldview. With that facing up to reality behind us, we could begin the hard work of “landing the plane” as Kate Raworth says in Doughnut Economics. We could eliminate economic activity that adversely affects the environment but is non-essential to human welfare (everything from the military to luxury goods) while upgrading public services to cushion the blows of climate and decreased economic activity on the struggling majority as Jason Hickel advocates.
This system of endless growth and consumerism is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it: an Elysium with a few living in luxury while the masses die young in an Earth venting its rage against humans; or a world where we share the hardships that we and our recent ancestors have brought upon ourselves as we learn to live more meaningful lives with less stuff.
There’s mitigation, reducing energy and resource useage, and then there’s adaptation to increased flood risks, 50ºC summers and more intense storms.
Only an idiot could imagine Mediterranean climates are not going to have more droughts, wild fires and intolerably hot summers, or that low lying areas within the zones for TRS are not going to get harder hit by hurricanes.
Yet, neither is being achieved at anything like the levels needed to sustain industrial societies if net zero is not reached before the tipping points, even though both require lots of economic activity, whether growth or degrowth oriented.
Those less industrialised and urbanised countries with intermediate levels of development will be far more suited to re-emerge as sustainable societies, than the post industrial heavy hi-tech dependent, but low practical skilled urbanised nations. So be it.