Climate mitigation and adaptation

Mitigation means reducing the amount or rate of future climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions or removing them from the atmosphere; adaptation means adjusting human systems to cope with climate impacts that are already happening or are now considered unavoidable. Both are needed together, not as alternatives to each other. Mitigation strategies span a wide range: shifting electricity generation to lower-carbon sources (covered in depth in the next unit), improving energy efficiency, carbon pricing mechanisms such as a carbon tax (a direct fee per ton of emissions) or cap-and-trade (a capped, shrinking total number of tradeable emissions permits), reforestation, and emerging direct-air-capture technology. Adaptation strategies include sea walls and managed coastal retreat, drought-resistant crop varieties, updated building codes for extreme heat, and early-warning systems for extreme weather.

Here is the central non-partisan distinction of this unit: the underlying climate science covered in Weeks 24 through 26 is settled among scientists, but deciding what policy response to take, and how quickly, is a genuine values-and-trade-offs question -- involving cost, speed, fairness across countries and generations, and economic disruption -- where thoughtful, well-informed people can and do reach different conclusions even when they fully agree on the science. This course presents the menu of real strategies and their trade-offs rather than ranking them, because that ranking depends on which values and priorities are weighted most heavily, a judgment call for citizens and communities, not something science alone settles.