October 31, 2021

I was surprised when I started doing my Masters’s Degree in Climate Action Leadership (MACAL) at Royal Roads University about my gut reaction to adaptation. I have professionally worked on campaigns to secure strong mitigation policies for well over a decade, and little did I know that I would feel like shifting to adaptation would make me feel like I was giving up.

In the mitigation world, all energy focuses on keeping temperature changes below 1.5° C, while planning for adaptation requires planning for the worst (Lash, 2021). The results of global climate models summarized in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Assessment Report 6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (AR6) warn of the increased occurrence of extreme weather events is temperature change exceeds 1.5°C. However, neither confirmed climate policies nor 2030 commitments from countries worldwide are enough to get us to net-zero by 2050 (Langlois-Bertrand, 2021). More needs to be done, but it is unclear if that will happen in time. Efforts to date have taken us from a 3.6°C pathway to 2.7°C (Climate Action Tracker, 2021), but that is not enough to avoid the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. So I understand the logic of planning for the worst, but I still felt like I was giving up.

One of the challenges we were given in the MACAL is designing a program to increase awareness and understanding of climate change using Design Thinking methodology. Design Thinking utilizes an iterative and creative process to develop new approaches to messy problems such as climate change (Stanford Design Thinking, 2019). My first instinct was to follow the teachings in Bashis et al., (2013), which found that high profile or iconic activists and thought leaders can be perceived as extremists creating a barrier to accepting the science and risk of climate change. I theorized that by engaging thought leaders from different sectors such as fishing and farming and training them to speak to the issue, they could use their credibility to build understanding amongst their peers. Working with teammates Laura Heidenheim, Leah de Montreuil, and Nancy Prevost, we developed a top-down approach that started with a national training for sector leaders followed by sector level engagement (Heidenheim et al. 2021)

As the team worked through course readings and the various stages of the project, I felt my logic stumble. When I read “You are not going to believe what I tell you” by Inmam (2020), I theoretically applied the “fight or flight” reaction to the original concept and found flaws in my earlier logic. Would we be putting the sector leaders at risk by elevating them to a status where their peers perceive them as activists? Is it ethically right to risk putting people in this position? And if I could justify that, would the goal of increasing engagement on climate change be reached if the sector leaders were alienated and/or ignored. I also considered the work of Ettinger et al. (2021) that found that framing climate issues in terms of hope instead of doom and gloom elicited the strongest emotional response. I could no longer conclude that fostering conversations within a sector about how their industries were at risk would spur action.

The more I read about the polarizing effect of climate change, the more challenging our original concept felt.

So I started to dip my toe into the idea of adaptation being a pathway to change. The extreme weather events felt across Canada seemed to make climate change real for more people. While there is no data from this summer that I can find, my personal communications with people in my community, with my family across Canada, and in reading news coverage suggested that dealing with the impacts of climate change had increased acceptance of the reality of climate change. I started to wonder if increased understanding about the need for climate adaptation would also increase support for climate mitigation. 

Research by Carrico et al. (2015) assessed how talking about adaptation affects risk salience or risk compensation. Risk salience is when, in learning about the need for adaptation, there is an increase in understanding of the need for mitigation to avoid exacerbating the problem. On the other hand, risk compensation is a change in behaviour in a negative way after taking action. For example, when a person takes measures to become more energy-efficient, then believe they are justified in using more energy. This study found partial support for risk salience when learning about climate adaptation, although political ideology had a much stronger influence. While the findings in this paper are not conclusive, there is a suggestion that the side benefit of the adaptation pathway is a concern for mitigation.

There was something there, but it was still a hazy idea that had yet to form fully.

That is where the Design Thinking Approach showed its value. Our team resumed meeting in September and started to question our original premise. The creative space of our video calls allowed us to talk through our ideas, be challenged, adjust our logic, and let go of one idea while latching on to another. It was in this messy, creative, supportive space that the swirling in my head began to take shape. Through their own journey, others on the team had come to similar and different conclusions, all of which brought new insights.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) struck a chord with us. The Nature-based Solutions Institute (NbSI) defined NbS as “solutions to societal challenges that involve working with nature.” The concept of NbS has, in some cases, been co-opted by oil and gas companies as they advocate for planting trees and offsets, which has gained them a reputation as a “false solution” (Seddon, 2021). However, when designed with communities and biodiversity in the center, NbS can provide numerous benefits, including rehabilitating local environments to deal with impacts from climate change ( Seddon, 2021). This could include providing more shade to protect against extreme heat, repairing rivers and wetlands to minimize flooding, etc. 

The team’s collective wisdom landed on the idea of building community engagement in local nature-based solutions as a more effective way to build awareness of and engagement in response to climate change. This approach would help local communities become more resilient to climate impacts with the potential side benefit of increased support for mitigation efforts. It could avoid the “fight or flight” response by meeting people where they live and solving seemingly digestible local challenges instead of global-scale challenges. Further research is required to land the proper framing, but I am conffident “hope” will play into it.

We also chose to flip our organizing model. Instead of starting with a national gathering, we would begin to train people in communities and help them engage community members. We would then hold a national conference in two years for participants to share their experiences. This new model builds an opportunity to adjust the program to meet the needs of the communities, building in the iterative part of Design Thinking. By taking the bottom-up instead of the top-down approach, we hope to empower instead of impose engagement and action.

I no longer feel like I am giving up on ambitious climate action by working on adaptation. My narrow view has broadened to accept the inevitability of adapting to climate change to preserve community health and biodiversity. And while there is a potential benefit of increased support for mitigation strategies, that is not the driving factor. I now clearly see adaptation as a critical pathway to including more people in solving the messy problem of climate change. I am both surprised and relieved to have landed in this place. And I am looking forward to where this project will take me next.

References

Bashir, N. Y., Lockwood, P., Chasteen, A. L., Nadolny, D., & Noyes, I. (2013). The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43(7), 614–626. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1983

Carrico, A. R., Truelove, H. B., Vandenbergh, M. P., & Dana, D. (2015). Does learning about climate change adaptation change support for mitigation? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 41, 19–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.10.009

Climate Action Tracker, (2021, May), Temperatures, Addressing Global Warming, https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

Ettinger, J., Walton, P., Painter, J., & DiBlasi, T. (2021). Climate of hope or doom and gloom? Testing the climate change hope vs. fear communications debate through online videos. Climatic Change, 164(1–2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-02975-8

Laura Heidenheim, L., Lash,J., de Montreuil, L., Prevost, N., (2021), Team Two  Design Thinking Project, Royal Roads University, MCAL Program.

Lash, J., (2021), Aim for the Best, Prepare for the Worst, Blog

Inman, M. (2020). You’re not going to believe what I’m going to tell you. The Oatmeal. 

Langlois-Bertrand, S., Vaillancourt, K., Beaumier, L., Pied, M., Bahn, O., Mousseau, N. (2021). Canadian Energy Outlook 2021 — Horizon 2060, with the contribution of Baggio, G., Joanis, M., Stringer, T. Institut de l’énergie Trottier and e3c Hub [Web] http://iet.polymtl.ca/energy-outlook/

IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T.

Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.

Nature-Based Solutions Initiative. (n.d.). Nature Based Solutions Initiative. Retrieved October 

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Seddon, N., Smith, A., Smith, P., Key, I., Chausson, A., Girardin, C., House, J., Srivastava, S., & Turner, B. (2021). Getting the message right on nature‐based solutions to climate change. Global Change Biology, 27(8), 1518–1546. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15513

Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course. (2019, October 21). [Video]. YouTube.