Climate-resilient pathways: adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development
By: Yanna Aleksandrovich
Resilience:the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Sustainability:ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely.
Adaptation:a change or the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.
Mitigation:the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.
Transformation:a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.
some reasons why we would want policy changes....
- Water and air quality standards
- Management of hazardous materials
- Changes in regulation (although some literature says that current institutional controls and linkages are counterproductive
- Agricultural and industrial practices
- Water and solid waste management
- A movement toward greater efficiency in resource use including recycling.
- An emphasis on energy efficiency, progressing toward renewable energy as an alternative to non-renewable fossil fuel resources (Frey and Linke, 2002).
climate-resilient pathways
Adaptation and Mitigation
• Actions to reduce human-induced climate change and its impacts, including both mitigation and adaptation toward achieving sustainable development
• Actions to ensure that effective institutions, strategies, and choices for risk management will be identified, implemented, and sustained as an integrated part of achieving sustainable development.
- Adaptation and mitigation depend on one another, they can reduce climate risks but they do so at different time scales
- Adaptation addresses current and committed climate change
- Mitigation reduces future climate risks
Introduction
- In terms of “what to do” to address climate
change and threats to development now and
in the future, the chapter identifies and
discusses climate-resilient pathways.
- Climate-resilient pathways are defined
in this chapter as development trajectories
- that combine adaptation and mitigation with effective institutions to realize the goal of sustainable development.
- This section integrates a variety of complex concepts in assessing climate-resilient pathways.
- It takes sustainable development as the ultimate goal, and considers mitigation as a way to keep climate change moderate rather than extreme.
- Adaptation is considered a response strategy to anticipate and cope with impacts that cannot be (or are not) avoided under different scenarios of climate change.

How we can transform sustainable development
- To promote sustainable development in all countries within the context of climate change, climate resilient pathways may involve significant transformations.
What transformations?
- Transformations in political, economic, and socio-technical systems can contribute to enhanced climate responses, both for mitigation and adaptation.