Adaptation and resilience: how can we live with the choices we make?

Particular caution should be taken in the face of tipping points in complex systems, as many are likely to be irreversible or may cause unintuitive and rapidly intensifying impacts on people and nature. For example, changes to both climate conditions and ecosystems can distort the way that pollutants in the natural environment behave, creating novel terminal products or causing contaminants to produce unexpected harms.

Likewise, the cumulative impact of pressures on multiple systems must be accounted for, to ensure that humanity’s capacity to adapt is sufficient to create resilience to all the consequences of its decisions and not just the most intuitive changes. 

In the face of these challenges, society’s approach to adaptation must be developed with reference to interlinked social and natural systems. Adaptation efforts have historically focused on the climate crisis, and within that context have disproportionately centred on flood defence. A more holistic approach to adaptation will be necessary, regardless of which pathways are taken, integrating energy security, food security, water security, and ecosystem resilience into approaches to the climate crisis.

Across adaptive efforts, governments should also account for the risks and challenges associated with biodiversity loss, pollution, and other environmental issues such as soil degradation. Soil is essential to a substantial proportion of the global food supply – as much as 95 per cent in countries like the UK – so threats to soil are likewise threats to global food security, the supply of human labour which needs to be fed, and the complex value chains linked to global trade.

Structural changes in ecosystems, including fragmentation, species distribution, and disruption of habitats, can all lead to the loss of functionality and the disruption of the ecosystem services which are vital to both humanity and the wider natural world. 

These changes can exacerbate the ecological emergency, but can also have immediate effects on the way people live their lives, requiring adaptation to retain access to food, natural resources, and key regulating functions of the environment such as carbon cycling and storage. Most critically, the potential loss of some ecosystems, such as alpine systems or coral reefs, could have devastating cascading effects on the global environment.

Urban environments will have a significant impact over the shape of the future. As economic growth drives land use change, there has been a substantial conversion of the human habitat from diverse ecosystems into urban or agricultural land, with the same systems driving unsustainable consequences for the natural world.

This process of urbanisation has led to many socio-natural challenges, including for transport, air quality, and housing, but has also given rise to opportunities for shared access to goods and services. In the modern world, the challenges of urbanisation are often seen most dramatically in the global south, where populations are increasingly concentrated in urban centres.

The challenge for the future will be to ensure that society maximises the opportunities of urban environments while adapting to the associated risks, making use of ‘place-making’ approaches and the broader integration of sustainability principles in local plans. There are inherent justice questions at the heart of how cities and towns are designed, which are only likely to increase as demographic change drives competition for economic migrants and social change polarises attitudes to the jobs and services which urban centres can provide.

Whether those opportunities are maximised will determine if urbanisation continues to drive environmental degradation without increasing opportunities, or if the process of altering the urban environment can become a positive influence. That requires an approach to planning and design which embeds resilience, co-benefits, and environmental improvement at every stage.

Many instruments already exist to support the proliferation of adaptive measures to address these challenges, though the majority are not yet scaled to meet those challenges, tuned towards adaptation as their objective, or operating with reference to the complex systems and interconnected crises which they must be able to address.

Regulatory measures such as European Habitats Regulations, Biodiversity Net Gain approaches, or Nutrient Neutrality requirements have the capacity to embed adaptation throughout the processes most likely to interact with ecosystems. Heuristics like the mitigation hierarchy demonstrate the potential to embed approaches, particularly if they are utilised at the design stage, while metrics and case studies can improve consistency of delivery across projects or scales. 

Key challenges can also be addressed more directly, such as setting priority habitats and aligning them with framework-level governance such as land use frameworks or national biodiversity commitments.

Ultimately, individual measures will only be as effective at embedding ecosystem resilience into decision making as the principles, values, and understandings which underpin them. Before any of these approaches can succeed, society must value the inherent benefits of the natural world, not just as an economic asset but for the wider values and sources of wellbeing that it can address.

The more that people imagine themselves to be separate from the natural world, the harder it will be to embed resilience to environmental crises, and the less likely society is to secure the full range of benefits on offer.