Greg Austing wrote this piece for his weekly column in New Europe.

Charles Darwin’s revolutionary work, Origin of Species, holds out a very clear message for managing our daily life, collectively and individually. Darwin writes with scientific coldness: “The slightest advantage in one being, at any age or during any season, over those with which it comes into competition, or better adaptation in however slight a degree to the surrounding physical conditions, will turn the balance.” Please focus here not on the biological environment but the physical environment.

Now tie this to the situation created by the cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. Discussions in Brussels last week at the World Economic Forum Europe are very sobering. In a session called in part “Rising from the Ashes”, the conclusions actually belied the title. Planning for natural disaster like this might as well have been non-existent. The meeting summary notes: “The volcano began showing signs of erupting a month earlier, but the warning signals were ignored and, when the crisis hit, just about everyone was taken unaware.”

The subsequent discussion in Brussels showed just how vulnerable complex economies are to such physical disturbances, not least though the heavy reliance of just-in-time inventory policies which have exposed everyone to serious risk. Air cargo is the main source of delivery for urgent repair of sensitive IT equipment on which our daily life now depends.

The lessons for our response to climate change should be obvious, at least at the first level of contingency planning. Fixing a near total absence of contingency planning for disaster should be fairly straight forward, even as it requires some shift in the culture of preparedness.

At a deeper level, there is cause for concern. What is our capacity for adaptation if the contingency planning is inadequate and there is a fundamental change in the “surrounding physical conditions”.

Climate change will bring, and is already brining, political change. Power is shifting. Who will adapt best, who will win this new struggle for survival of the fittest? For me the answer lies in an understanding of the concept of adaptation. And here there is cause for concern about the way in which the international community is approaching “adaptation”. It is being presented as something that only the poorer, most vulnerable developing countries need to do. It is being presented as something that richer countries can deliver through processes akin to classic foreign aid delivery. Even in its forms that come closer to home, it is being presented as a “low carbon urban dream”. The suggestion appears to be that we will be ready for climate change if we shift to a low carbon economy. Sorry, but all of the low carbon measures in the world will not prepare you for politics under climate change. Billions of dollars in support to adaptation funds for Africa or small island states will not help either. The reason is that adaptation is a more complex phenomenon than these responses imply. 

In a paper prepared for the Climate Group by Richard Klein and others, the authors gave a clear and instructive definition: “adaptation entails an ongoing process in which private and public stakeholders interact to make behavioural, economic, institutional and technological changes to the way they live, work and manage their business”.

The test, therefore, of your capacity – or mine – to adapt to changes in the politics of climate change will be measured more by our nimbleness in changing the way we live and work. I don’t sense much commitment to this. I don’t see much expectation that the political rules we use to respond to a changing physical environment may undergo fundamental and unpredictable change as well.

The foundation for a prediction about the direction of change here lies with Darwin. The political (and economic) systems that better adapt to face a changed climate will do better than those that do not. Mitigation through low carbon policies without adaptation in politics or social order at home for the consequences of changed climate is like knowing that volcanoes spew ash but ignoring the fact that we all live in the shadow of the volcano.