In London, UK, last week, on a rare overseas trip, I attended the launch of a new campaign initiated by the Climate Majority Project to refocus the efforts of climate advocates from mitigation (cutting greenhouse gases) to what they referred to as “strategic adaptation”. The approach is outlined in the report they released called SAFER: Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience.

Many climate advocates have been resistant to talk about adaptation because, as the report recognizes, it appears to encourage giving up on mitigation, and it also appears to abandon communities in the Global South who are more at the frontlines of climate damages while having done much less to incur them. However, the proponents of SAFER argue for a more expansive form of adaptation. Their “strategic adaptation” is not simply reactive to disaster but also builds resilience, fosters agency, grows climate awareness, and transforms, for example, food systems; and, they argue, it will help mitigation. They recognize that without cuts to emissions we are on course for hothouse planet (runaway temperatures within decades) so they are not giving up, but rather arguing that the way to achieve mitigation is to not focus directly on it but instead to focus now on adaptation.

While I think SAFER gets many things right, I was perplexed by the way the event was launched, by the statement of untested assumptions as apparent facts, by the absence of an organizational strategy, and by the overly depoliticized language. Overall, I want to argue that given the ever-expanding impacts of climate breakdown, the approach of the Climate Majority Project of taking gentle steps rather than engaging in serious political struggle seems seriously misguided.

The presentation, in a packed lecture hall at University College London, started with the recognition that our valiant social mobilization for climate mitigation has mostly failed. Some facts that are salient for me are that the numbers engaging in rallies, sustained group organizing and even advocacy are clearly tiny in all our populations; global heating and climate damages are accelerating; fossil fuel finance and extraction are at record levels; and there is now, in the US and EU, a political backlash that threatens to erase the meager mitigation policies. And even when those policies were instituted, they were seldom made directly by the state, but instead outsourced to for-profit interests (see the case of Germany), and even then mostly concerned electricity supply and hardly transportation, buildings, agriculture and consumption, which is still encouraged almost everywhere under the mantra of economic growth.

The core theory of SAFER is that a refocus on strategic adaptation can build a bigger climate mobilization. This is because adaptation is in the material interest of local communities, and by concretizing climate action locally it will build consciousness for climate change as a reality, leading ultimately to a stronger climate movement for mitigation. This comes out of three key assumptions in the report:

1. Committing to adaptation overcomes the problem that the public in the UK is mostly complacent in fighting for climate action since they are lulled by the government’s promise to achieve Net Zero decades in the future, which is mostly a scam. Also, as the authors argue “the problem of climate change is an abstract story of invisible gases”. Instead, adaptation makes climate breakdown real through local, concrete action to address tangible threats.

2. Committing to adaptation might help working class and other communities overcome perceptions of climate action as leftist, hypocritical or irrelevant by addressing people’s immediate concerns such as rising energy costs and food security.

3. If many communities do join adaptation efforts, including pushing the government to prepare for heat waves, flooding, disruptions to food supply and the eventual likely collapse of the Atlantic Current that could reduce winter temperatures by 20 C (36 F) in some years, and if there is a serious national commitment to adaptation, then it will become obvious that adaptation is not enough, strengthening the case for mitigation.

I very much agree with SAFER’s focus on people’s material interests and the need to prepare and defend locally, but it has problems, including the lack of a broad coalition at the start, the statement of untested assumptions as apparent facts, the apparent absence of an organizational strategy to bind communities together, and an overly depoliticized approach.

First, the launch of SAFER did not showcase the kind of wide coalition that is necessary to build a movement. It was launched not merely as a report but as an appeal for funds to “[build] a powerful community gathering”. It included presentations from Retrofit Balsall Heath in Birmingham, UK, which is trying to retrofit homes to improve insulation, and from Greener Henley, which hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors at boating regattas on the river Thames, and is now seeking protections from flooding. Yet the line-up of 7 speakers did not apparently include anyone from the working class or unions or from the kind of multiracial coalition which would be needed in Britain to build a movement.

Second, it is a big assumption that doing local adaptation action will make the climate breakdown threat visible in a way that galvanizes people to want to struggle for mitigation later. It’s like assuming that because workers in a particular union learn to advocate for their own material interest that they will then want to also help the wider working class. But this is mostly contradicted by what many unions have become.

Now it might be, as the presenters argued, that people in hundreds of local communities who are engaged in adaptation actions in the UK do develop a wider consciousness that they are part of something bigger, that they are linked-up by some shared ideological understanding. But that will require SAFER to do a stellar job at on-the-ground organizing to build a movement of those hundreds of local communities. A major impediment to this might be that many Britons are currently facing profound inequality, affordability, health-care provision and housing crises and a general disenchantment with the standard political parties. So, SAFER campaigns need to connect directly with those kind of material interests, which are inherently political. But dealing with this is affected by the next problem.

Third, SAFER will be hampered by the Climate Majority Project’s commitment to “depolarizing’ the climate issue. As the report explains, they want to depolarize after observing how the early successes of Extinction Rebellion in the UK led to a societal backlash against the “radicals” and how the right has brought climate into the culture wars. But in the SAFER report the world “capitalism” does not appear once, nor does “ownership”. And this in a country with privatized utilities for water, electricity and rail.

In San Diego California, we have built a campaign to mobilize the city population to confront the investor owned utility (owned by a fossil fuel company) that controls our electric grid, extracting over half a billion dollars per year in profit. This campaign for public not-for-profit ownership is very much in the spirit of SAFER: it connects with people’s material interest by promising lower electricity prices, it prepares for a climate damaged future by emphasizing local rooftop solar and storage instead of building long-distance transmission lines to remote solar mega-projects, and it likely achieves lower emissions by accelerating the renewable transition. Unlike SAFER however, it is explicitly political – the issue is about ownership, about changing social relations. We have seen that we can also appeal to some conservatives, who also don’t like monopoly corporate control. Perhaps then the challenge for SAFER is to build a progressive populism that is targeted at elite/corporate power without being encumbered with typical socialist connotations?

Fourth, if the proponents of SAFER believe that an adaptation-engaged climate-realist populace will then be ready for the mitigation struggle, and if they can actually build the mass movement of connected organizations to do that, it will need to be militant, even revolutionary, which appears completely at odds with their framing. The mitigation struggle is a confrontation with the interests of fossil fuel finance, fossil fuel extraction, and US and other military hegemony.  Beyond that, unless we entertain the unsubstantiated assumptions of green capitalism of a nice, clean, green technical transition, it is also a confrontation with the core aspect of modernity – endless economic growth. Indeed, quite apart from the problem with carbon, we are now superseding 7 of 9 planetary boundaries (i.e. boundaries beyond which our world is not in a safe operating space, of which changes in nitrogen and phosphorous cycles and a thousand-fold increase in species extinctions are other examples). If we keep growing then a  big shift to wind and solar and electrifying nearly everything will continue to add to rather than replace fossil fuel energy, and will also push us further beyond the other planetary boundaries.

SAFER could look at what some social movement scholars are calling the most successful climate movement of our recent times Soulèvement De La Terre (Earth Uprisings) in France. A central organizing group is coordinating multiple communal home-grown struggles, such as fighting back to preserve local water supplies, knitting them together and providing key practical support, even while retaining a commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-fascism. In our world now, where international law is in tatters and, relatedly, the prospect for internationally-binding action on climate blown, where authoritarian forces grow and local populations even in the Global North are immiserated, we should not put all our confidence in SAFER’s depolarized politics that hopes to not offend.

As global heating accelerates and climate damages mount all around us, and as climate organizations and activists grow desperate about what to do, SAFER provides important new thinking. The challenge, one of the biggest of our times for organizers, theorists and social scientists, is how to bring this idea into our various countries at an organizational level. In the end, the path forward will require thousands of local communities to link up in a common movement so that they engage in coordinated political action that must be radical in the sense of changing social relations.

Teaser image credit: Mangrove planting activity in the Phillipines, part of a natural defense against flooding. By USAID U.S. Agency for International Development – FrontLines/EGAT 2011 Environment Photo Contest Top Entry, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54737538