Making Climate Change Work for Us: European Perspectives on Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies

Introducing the main challenges and opportunities of developing local, regional and global strategies for addressing climate change, this book explains the dilemmas faced when converting strategies into policies. Providing a synthesis of the findings of the three-year European Commission ADAM (Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies) research project and written by many leading interdisciplinary climate change research teams, European strategies for tackling climate change are placed within a global context. The book illustrates the differences between adaptation and mitigation, offers regional and global case studies of how adaptation and mitigation are inter-linked, and suggests six different metaphors for the strategic options to make climate change work for us, rather than against us. Offering practical solutions to climate change – both adaptation and mitigation – within the policy contexts in which these solutions have to be implemented, this book is valuable for researchers in varied related fields, as well policymakers in government, industry and NGOs.

Henry Neufeldt is head of the climate change program of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Nairobi, Kenya. Between 2006 and 2009 he was based in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and a Senior Research Coordinator in the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, where he managed the ADAM project. His research interest is in global climate change, vulnerability and sustainable development, in particular mitigation and adaptation in land management in the context of science and policy. He has worked primarily in Germany, Brazil and Paraguay. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters as well as numerous reports on sustainable land use in the tropics and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.

Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from 2000 to 2007. His research interests include representations of climate change in history, society and the media, the design and uptake of climate scenarios, and the interaction between climate change science and policy. His previous book – Why We Disagree About Climate Change – was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. He has prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios), the European Commission, the IPCC, UNEP, UNDP and WWF-International. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed journal papers and over 35 book chapters on these and other topics, together with over 230 reports and popular articles about climate change. He is co-editor of the journal Global Environmental Change and editor-in-chief of the newly launched Wiley's Interdisciplinary Review – Climate Change. He delivered the prestigious Queen's Lecture in Berlin in 2005 and won the Hugh Robert Mill Prize in 1995 from the Royal Meteorological Society.