Just as it is important to reduce carbon emissions to fight against climate change, it is equally important to strengthen urban infrastructures for extreme climate events, adapt agricultural policies to changing climate conditions, and even provide psychological support to people affected by the negative consequences of climate change. Such activities carried out to adapt to the current and future negative consequences of climate change are called climate change adaptation. In fact, it is a necessity to carry out climate change adaptation activities. As pointed out in the 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC, even under all emission scenarios, global temperatures will continue to increase until the middle of the century. For this reason, it is essential to develop resistance to the extraordinary climatic events that will result from these temperature increases.
In order to prevent damage to energy and transportation infrastructures caused by severe floods and storms caused by climate change, these infrastructures must be made resistant to extreme climatic events. There is no doubt that such an activity would require huge amounts of financing. The World Bank reveals that between 2010 and 2050, 75 to 100 billion USD should be allocated each year by developing countries to adapt to climate change[1]. According to a report published by the United Nations in 2007, 14 billion dollars is required to make the agriculture sector in developing countries resistant to climate change by 2030.
However, funding is not the only problem facing adaptation efforts. All stakeholders, from the private sector to the public, need to contribute adaptation. In fact, it is essential to plan for climate change adaptation, from neighborhoods of a few hundred to the national and even global levels. At this point, the concepts of hard adaptation and soft adaptation comes up. While hard adaptation requires the application of centralized, capital-intensive, advanced technologies for climate change adaptation activities, soft adaptation envisages the inclusion of each individual in the adaptation process and the determination of the possible effects of climate change on a micro scale and locally inspired solutions to these effects[2].
As a result, it is inevitable for our common future to carry out adaptation activities in order to combat the problems caused by climate change today and likely to cause it in the future.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2011/06/06/economics-adaptation-climate-change-country-case-studies#:~:text=The%20World%20Bank’s%20global%20study,the%20period%202010%20to%202050.
[2] https://www.adaptation-undp.org/sites/default/files/downloads/sovacool-cp-hardsoft.pdf
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