Janetos’s Paper on Importance of Climate Adaptation Published Posthumously in Climatic Change

The late Anthony Janetos, Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future from 2013-2019, wrote an essay titled “Why is climate adaptation so important? What are the needs for additional research?” that was posthumously published in the journal Climatic Change.

In the essay, Prof. Janetos presented a general framework for climate adaptation research and decision making. He identified the minimization of risk as the ultimate goal of adaptation decisions, particularly with respect to a given sector’s sensitivity to the interrelated impacts of climate change, development, and evolving risks over time. He stressed the importance of recognizing how a sector’s sensitivity to climate change can change over time, how the effectiveness of adaptation decisions is just as important as the sector’s climate sensitivity, and how the probability of climate disasters are affected by changes in the climate system over time.

Based on the framework he presented, Prof. Janetos recommends a set of new research needs to support climate adaptation in the future. He called for new demands on research to make adaptation more effective and efficient by better understanding the relationship between sectors, climate, and time.

Read the essay here.