Living in volatile times

Climate justice beyond the adaptation vs. mitigation debate

Shuchi Vora

This article reframes climate justice by arguing that adaptation and mitigation must work hand-in-hand. True climate justice requires building resilience through the redistribution of funding, power, and knowledge—transforming local communities from passive beneficiaries into expert partners.

As I write this piece, I am sitting in Delhi where temperatures have hit all-time highs of 45 degrees C in April already. Our cities have long forgotten cooling solutions apart from air conditioners, and ACs only drive emissions further, thus leading to more heat. Walking on pavements during the day feels impossible, and I can only imagine how people who live and work in the open - construction labour, vegetable vendors, cab drivers, basically anyone who has to bear extreme heat - can function without facing immediate as well as longer term effects of this heat wave. Even if we manage to contain global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, such heat waves are baked into models, predictions and our collective lived realities. 

Adaptation remains secondary even in proposals that focus on adaptation and resilience. I was once asked to contribute to a proposal for ensuring climate finance flows to the poorest urban slum dwelling communities across South Asia and Africa. The proposal text - drafted by some well-meaning colleagues across a consortium of organisations working on climate adaptation - listed “Reduction of emissions from urban slum settlements”. The burden of mitigation is not on the poor communities in developing countries. No amount of reduction of emissions from slum settlements - however it appeases donors - can make a dent in overall climate emissions. 

Climate Justice concerns in Climate Adaptation and Resilience

The Adaptation Gap Report 2025 highlights that this gap in adaptation finance is only widening - the total adaptation costs are pegged at US $365 billion by 2035, based on extrapolated needs expressed by countries in their National Adaptation Plans and Nationally Determined Contributions. To make things worse, public adaptation finance is reducing - down from $ 28 billion in 2022 to $26 billion in 2023. In all, less than 2% of total climate finance is earmarked for adaptation at present. 

This lack of finance towards adaptation and resilience is critically affecting how we as an interconnected humanity conceptualise our lives in the face of a new temperature normal that is increasingly becoming a reality. This interconnectedness is critical to recognising and reimagining more funding into resilience-building. 

To add to this, it is crucial that –of the limited finance that is available– resources should be spent on those people and places that stand to be impacted the most in equipping them with the agency to take action. Adapting to climate change requires the undoing of centuries of colonial injustices - not just from the colonial powers, but also from institutions, structures and mindsets that prevail due to the remnants of colonial rule in many countries. For instance, while groundwater, with its high residence times (ie. groundwater does not face large instantaneous changes due to weather variability because it is underground) can be a crucial water source in the face of Day Zero situations for cities like Cape Town, Bengaluru and so on, it also is highly depleted because of colonial property laws in most of these countries which mandate the ownership of water below the land to the property owner. This epistemological and ontological shift towards justice in adaptation and resilience research, policy and practice requires some fundamental changes in our language and worldviews towards adaptation and resilience.

Resilience: Adaptation is not an alternative to mitigation

Mitigation gets the lion’s share of funding because it is easier to track, imagine and celebrate successes. Satellite imagery, Artificial intelligence, and other technology can effectively track emission increase or reduction. However, resilience-building is a process of learning and innovation, and therefore requires not just an epistemological shift, but also an ontological one, in measuring evidence, and therefore creating metrics for financial flows for successful interventions as described.

Efforts to build adaptation and mitigation need to be synergised rather than further siloed. Without mitigation, there are limits to adaptation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s AR6 report defines adaptation limits as points beyond which climate risks cannot be reduced below acceptable levels. They classify these as hard limits, soft limits, systemic limits. Similarly the Earth Systems Justice framework has highlighted overshoots of Planetary Boundaries - globally, scientists have determined that seven of the nine planetary boundaries have already been breached. 

In this scenario, adaptation and mitigation cannot be implemented in silos. Climate impacts affect communities globally in a disproportionate manner, and those with the least emission contributions stand to be impacted the most. Adaptation is non-linear, relational and requires intrinsic systemic shifts. Resilience, thus, is the ability to cope, adapt and transform these social-ecological systems such that people and places are able to thrive in the face of shocks and stresses. Resilience includes both adaptation and mitigation, recognising the capacities that need to be built for humans and nature to thrive within planetary boundaries. Resilience-building, thus, needs to be more intentional, strategic and systemic by the synergizing of adaptation and mitigation approaches rather than the stitching together of two separate approaches. For instance, emergency response interventions have to be combined with efforts to build long-term change through nature-based solutions, shifts in agricultural practices, and transformations of governance and institutional systems, that focus on low emission-futures while preserving local cultural and natural heritage. 

Knowledge, Power, & Justice in Climate Resilience

International flows of funds as well as knowledge have historically moved unilaterally from the minority world to the majority world (or global south to global north). This has resulted in “parachute science” not rooted in context that has often been accepted as evidence towards adaptation. However, indigenous and local worldviews have been surviving with and adapting to the natural variabilities of climate as well as other shocks like conflict, colonial rules and so on. 

Traditional recognition of expertise has required training and experience in western science and its articulation in English, even for local, indigenous, and other minority groups. This critical distinction in terms of expertise that is not just “of the head” but also “of the heart and hands” is crucial to ontological justice in resilience evidence. For instance, recognising that a farmer is an expert of their lands through lived experience and observation of nuanced local changes can be a crucial form of evidence. In this IIT-Kanpur research, the researchers validated the traditional beliefs of the farmers in Gangetic plains regarding frequency of irrigation and the direction of the winds by verifying relative humidity of the winds. This has a high relevance for integrating farming practices into irrigation management systems even as climate change impacts may change timings, frequency and severity of rainfall events in the region. In this case, the farmer is an expert, and understands their need for irrigation based on wind direction - the question is how much we as “experts” trained in western science are willing to acknowledge their expertise. 

The expansion of what counts as evidence is an important step towards this recognition of successful resilience interventions. Do intergenerational stories count as evidence? Do films, festivals and the arts count as evidence? At the Global Resilience Partnership, I experimented with “Arts for Resilience” grants and published some of the learnings as a team here. I learnt that it is possible to drive transformative outcomes towards resilience of communities that are disenfranchised through arts, and these transformations may come from shifting worldviews, building agency and providing these communities with negotiation power to shift structures, strike partnerships and create enabling conditions for their resilience.  Justice, thus entails, accepting the legitimacy of IPLC (Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities) worldviews at par with western science, while recognising, reflecting on and trying to resolve the inherent tensions that surface with their differences. 

Need to build systems, not celebrate individual resilience

Much of the mainstream resilience language has celebrated individual resilience, stemming from traditional humanitarian and disaster risk resilience practice and focusing on the household as a key unit of resilience-building. However, this approach to resilience-building often ignores the structures that enable or act as barriers to the resilience of people and places. The mainstream narratives of communities rebuilding their lives and livelihoods after hurricanes, cyclones, floods and droughts that abound on social and digital media also render these structural issues of collective resilience invisible. 

We need to recognise relationships, trust within communities, their connection to place and space, and the governance of these attributes to build longer term resilience by reducing climate emissions as well as adapting to the volatility that comes with climate change.

Conclusion

Justice concerns in adaptation and resilience focus as much on what the evidence is, as they do on how it is produced. Epistemological and ontological concerns on how evidence is used and produced, who are the decision-makers and how power relationships get reinforced through evidence-building processes are alive for adaptation. Communities have the agency to use and produce the adaptation evidence they are not just beneficiaries of, but are participants in change-making processes of adapting. 

While discourses like Locally Led Adaptation are discussed in negotiations, the urgency in fact, is not to transfer the burden of adapting solely on communities themselves, but build capacities, structures, partnerships and enabling mindsets for collaborative leadership, power redistribution and justice. For us as researchers, policy-makers and practitioners, this focus on resilience as climate justice - as opposed to a mitigation-adaptation discourse - brings to the table newer roles not as 'doers' but 'enablers' or 'partners' in the process of building just resilience to climate change”. 

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Shuchi has over 15 years of experience on community-led climate programmes, MEL and learning facilitation for the resilience landscape, with previous experience in WWF, TNC, and the Global Resilience Partnership. She is  an Oxford graduate from the Water Science Policy and Management course at School of Geography and the Environment

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