Adapting Strategically to Climate Breakdown: How We Can All Work to Make a Difference and Keep Each Other #Safer
Rupert Read and Caroline Lucas on the Climate Majority Project's new campaign to make climate impacts a national priority, giving voice to the hidden majority who are waking up to climate reality
When you think about dangerous climate change, what is it you picture?
Most likely it is difficult to conjure up something tangible and vivid. Maybe you think of graphs about the greenhouse effect, or you think of oil rigs in the sea spurting gas into the sky, or perhaps glaciers melting in the Arctic. All of these are abstract visualisations, with little or no human component. They might not feel quite fully real to you.
Sometimes you might picture the damages caused by climate breakdown that would affect humans. Droughts in Africa for example, or floods in the Philippines – or Texas. Wildfires in Australia perhaps, or hurricanes in the Caribbean. These visions are a step above charts and gas, but they too perpetuate the myth that climate breakdown is not here, in this country, today.
The biggest problem with communicating climate breakdown is that it is so difficult to make tangible. When we think about it, it is almost always abstract, difficult to relate to, and/or in a far-off part of the world.
This intangibility, in part, explains why it can be difficult to get people to come together to do much about it. So far, mass mobilisation efforts have fallen into this trap; being mainly concerned with pressuring Government to reduce the amount of invisible gas the nation emits. Do not misunderstand us – reducing emissions is urgent and essential, but we need to find new ways to reboot the process and to rally more people behind it.
A strategy beginning in climate adaptation promises exactly that, because it can fix the intangibility of climate breakdown. For when we adapt to the damage that is already here and which is still to come, then by our very actions we are showing that we recognise the reality of what is happening.
Far from being a distraction from decarbonisation, strategic adaptation can thus act as a catalyst for it, by transforming climate breakdown from the status of an abstract threat to a lived and shared reality.
The Global North has, until relatively recently, been fairly insulated from the impacts of climate breakdown; but this is changing before our eyes. The US is experiencing hurricanes (Florida), wildfires (California) and flash floods (Texas) at an unprecedented scale, and mainland Europe has also seen a sharp rise in the frequency and severity of droughts, wildfires, and floods (Remember Valencia).
Our island nation has been extremely lucky so far to avoid truly major incidences. Our luck will not last.
Indeed, the UK is already feeling the start of climate breakdown. 2024 had the second worst harvest on record in the UK, due primarily to severe swings in weather from dry to wet. Flood alerts were at record levels for the first four months of 2024, and the year also saw record insurance claims. Spring 2025 has also been the hottest and sunniest on record. Records will continue to be broken as the climate continues to deteriorate.
Right now, as we write this, we are heading already into our third heatwave of the summer. It isn’t as crazy as the 40 degrees Celcius heatwave that we experienced three years ago, which destroyed the records that had stood since the extreme summer of 1976; but every heatwave kills some, particularly the elderly and infirm. . We are getting more and more heatwaves, and they are getting more and more extreme.
Climate risks manifest differently in different parts of the world. The most obvious in much of our damp island usually (though not it seems this summer) is flooding, with our lowlands being particularly susceptible to both coastal and river flooding.
A strategy of adaptation in response would include building up natural flooding protection. Restoring wild woodland would be a great start, as would be lining our rivers with natural shrubs and hedges. Restoring wetlands and peatlands would also be invaluable. Eastern parts of England in particular have drained or ‘reclaimed’ many of their peatlands, marshes, salt marshes and mudflats. Once restored, they act as natural reservoirs to stop or slow intense flooding. (Returning beavers to the landscape can also really help here.)
Then there is the risk of wildfire, which could come badly in this drought-stricken summer. And if it doesn’t, then it almost certainly will in a future summer. Britain is very vulnerable to wildfires because we have virtually no experience of them, compared to (say) Greece or California.
Other adaptation approaches are more human-centred. When disasters occur (and they will occur) the most important aspect for saving lives is having a community that cares for one another, and will share food, resources, and shelter when needed.
In the future, having a strong community could be the difference between life and death. All community-building actions are therefore a form of adaptation-building, whether that’s joining a local choir, a football club, or helping out at local schools. Those might sound strange or even trivial responses to climate breakdown but our point is a very real and hopeful one: close-knit networks of neighbours working together will be increasingly vital for locally-based mitigation and adaptation.
Adaptation efforts are essential to our response to climate breakdown. Maybe in the 1980s, when human-caused climate change (then called ‘global warming’) was first known around the world, preventative ‘mitigation’ through reducing climate-deadly emissions was still a viable option. We have now largely missed that boat, and a certain proportion of climate breakdown is now, tragically, baked-in. We will feel the impacts, and they will hit our communities. It is our duty to make sure we adapt to the reality of climate breakdown so that, when disasters do hit, we are ready for them. And the beauty of it is that when we do this, we will be waking ourselves and everyone else up, and finding our agency: the essential preconditions to finally facing into the coming storms, thus yielding a chance to reboot the – still obviously vital – decarbonisation agenda.
The Government has just made a small start on the endeavour of facing up to climate reality, issuing its ‘Resilience Action Plan’ earlier this week. This plan improves on what there has been in this area previously but it is not strategic enough, and the funding remains woefully insufficient.
That’s why we are launching an official petition that would address these grave omissions: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730062 . Do please sign and shar it. 100,000 signatures would likely trigger a vital parliamentary debate where ministers can be held to account.
At the Climate Majority Project, we are very excited to have held this week our kick-off event for our Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience (SAFER) campaign, which builds on the ground-upward efforts of many unsung local heroes and promises finally to put adaptation properly into action.
The two of us ran this event to show how in our communities – and our businesses, and our professions, and by way of governance – we can make ourselves #safer together against what is here and what is coming.
Join us, in this vital work.
Dr. Rupert Read is Co-Director of the Climate Majority Project, co-editor of Deep Adaptation (Polity) and co-author of Transformative Adaptation (Penguin Random House).
Dr. Caroline Lucas was Britain’s first Green MP, is Adviser to the Climate Majority Project’s #SAFER campaign, and author of Another England (Penguin).
(Thanks to Joe Eastoe for research that greatly helped this piece.)
Unfortunately we have Trump, Farage and the rest of the right wing, assisted by a deliberately ill informed media, Reform are making climate denying an election issue. They see this as a vote winner.