The challenge of climate change is not just technological; it is political

Between my first article on climate adaptation and the follow-up I had promised, Giulio Boccaletti has contributed a piece to these pages entitled "Come governare il gran caldo". This is timely, given Boccaletti’s profile and the expertise with which he has been addressing the links between water, infrastructure, economic development and climate change for many years. His article highlights many of the things we will actually need to do: adapt cities to cope with temperatures different from those for which they were built; make the networks on which we depend more resilient; organise water use whilst taking into account a supply that is set to become increasingly problematic; prepare the agricultural sector; and strengthen the state’s capacity to intervene at a local level. Above all, his reasoning helps to pinpoint the starting point from which we should resume the discussion on adaptation.

In the first article, I noted that adaptation, in the Darwinian sense of the term, describes an outcome that can be achieved through selection. Individuals differ in their ability to survive and reproduce in a given environment; variants that confer an advantage become more common and, looking at the population after many generations, we say that it has adapted. For individuals who have disappeared along the way, this collective outcome naturally has a very different meaning. We possess a further possibility, which depends on a decisive characteristic of our species: we can visualise conditions that do not yet exist and can intervene before they materialise. Our capacity for adaptation also lies, to a very large extent, outside the body, in the extended phenotype consisting of the homes we inhabit, the machines we use and the collective organisation that keeps all this functioning. Prediction allows us to modify this phenotype in advance. We can design an electricity grid for temperatures we have not yet experienced, switch to different crops before changing rainfall patterns render traditional ones unsuitable, and transform a city based on what we predict will happen in twenty or thirty years’ time. This, ultimately, is the premise underpinning the solutions proposed by Boccaletti: we understand the direction of change well enough to begin constructing the artificial environment in which we will be able to cope with it.

This is where the first difficulty arises, and it concerns the very nature of the change to which we intend to adapt.

Discussing the rise in average temperature is essential for describing the energy dynamics of the climate system, yet in current discourse this risks conjuring up an image of a world identical to the present one, merely a few degrees warmer. What we are experiencing is far more complex. The distribution of extremes and precipitation patterns are changing; different events may combine in ways whose significance also depends on the structure of the societies they affect. The effects propagate through closely interconnected natural and man-made systems, so that a heatwave affects both public health and the electricity grid simultaneously through a spike in demand, whilst a drought can alter water availability to the point of forcing trade-offs between agricultural, industrial and domestic uses. Climate science now devotes a significant part of its attention precisely to such compound events and cascading risks. The term ‘chaos’, in the ordinary sense of the word, describes the resulting social experience quite well, provided it is not attributed the technical meaning it possesses in the theory of dynamical systems. The decisive factor is non-stationarity. As long as we continue to increase climate forcing, the environment to which we wish to adapt continues to change over the time required to forecast, plan and implement our adaptation. We do not currently know of a final climate configuration to which we can systematically adapt our cities, agriculture and infrastructure, because that configuration will also depend on the quantity of greenhouse gases we continue to release into the atmosphere and the duration of that process.

Here, the comparison proposed by Boccaletti with places that already experience warmer or drier conditions than our own loses much of its force. The fact that complex societies function in Arizona or Jordan demonstrates that a complex society can organise itself within certain climatic conditions. A system that has had time to build its organisation within a specific environmental regime faces a different problem from that of a society which must transform infrastructure designed for a particular climate whilst that climate continues to shift. Our ability to forecast therefore introduces a specific condition: the future must change slowly enough for our predictions to retain their value over the time required to respond. A major piece of infrastructure designed today will be completed in a few years’ time and will have to function for decades. If the conditions for which it was designed change too rapidly, part of the investment in adaptation will be deployed in an environment different from that for which it was conceived. It may happen that a solution which is effective in the short term leads to subsequent vulnerability, through the phenomenon that the climate literature refers to as ‘maladaptation’. The adaptation of our extended phenotype is therefore a race between two speeds: the rate at which the environment changes and the rate at which we are able to predict that change and implement a response in the real world. Technology gives us an extraordinary advantage as long as this second speed remains sufficient. Its effectiveness diminishes when the target shifts during the time needed to reach it.

It is at this point that emissions reduction takes on a significance that goes beyond the usual distinction between mitigation and adaptation. Reducing radiative forcing serves to make adaptation itself possible, slowing the shift in the environment to the extent that forecasts retain their value. For CO₂, the fundamental relationship is well known: global warming stabilises when net emissions reach zero; in scenarios where the target temperature is temporarily exceeded, negative net emissions subsequently allow the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ to be reduced. Carbon removal must also be factored into the balance when emissions remain that are difficult to eliminate.

Saying that we need to achieve net-zero emissions, however, leaves open the most important part of the political and technological issue: how to get there. The answer cannot simply consist of making emissions progressively more expensive, whilst waiting for the price alone to change the behaviour of businesses and citizens. Such a system may be economically efficient in many contexts, but it creates a clear distributional problem when emissions effectively become something that can continue to be purchased. The cost of travelling one hundred kilometres or heating a home affects the household budgets of families with different incomes in very different ways; for those with substantial resources, a higher price may amount to little more than an additional cost that leaves their behaviour virtually unchanged. Climate policy thus risks transforming a physical constraint that affects everyone into a right to use the atmosphere distributed according to the ability to pay. The price of carbon retains a useful function when it is incorporated into a system in which accessible alternatives exist and the revenue is also used to prevent the transition from placing a disproportionate burden on those on the lowest incomes. OECD studies show that returning the revenue to households can considerably mitigate regressive effects, whilst the distributional outcome varies greatly depending on how those resources are used. The challenge, therefore, is to transform the production system quickly enough to make the low-emission option available to everyone, so that carbon reduction depends less and less on individual sacrifices purchased through the price mechanism.

This shifts a significant part of the effort towards technology. There are emissions that we already know how to avoid using mature technologies, yet which we continue to produce for economic, regulatory or organisational reasons. Methane provides a particularly clear example: in the fossil fuel sector, a large proportion of emissions can already be eliminated by addressing leaks, recovering flows that are currently lost and modifying existing equipment; the International Energy Agency estimates that around 70 per cent of methane emissions linked to fossil fuels can be technically reduced using available technologies, with a significant proportion where the economic value recovered directly offsets the cost of the intervention. A rational policy should start here, because every tonne we know we can avoid without waiting for new inventions immediately reduces the rate at which we are moving the target.

Then there is the part of the problem where the available technologies are still too expensive or have not yet reached the required scale. Here, research must become an immediate political priority. We need to drastically reduce the cost of capturing CO₂ in industrial processes where it is produced in concentrated form and develop reliable methods for its long-term storage; we need to improve direct air capture, which currently remains expensive and is used on a minuscule scale compared to global emissions; we need to develop processes capable of permanently incorporating carbon into materials or recycling it within production cycles that reduce the reliance on new fossil carbon. The IEA considers carbon capture and storage to be particularly relevant for industrial sectors that are difficult to decarbonise and emphasises that direct removal from the atmosphere still requires innovation to bring down costs; For years, the National Academies have identified the research required to bring removal technologies to scale as one of the major scientific programmes that remains unfulfilled. In this context, the decisive step is not merely to make individual solutions feasible, but to develop them to the point where they can function as global infrastructure, integrated into existing energy and industrial systems.

When carbon is incorporated into a material that retains it permanently, the effect can be long-lasting; when it is converted into a fuel intended to be burnt again, the benefit lies primarily in avoiding the extraction of further fossil carbon and depends on the entire energy cycle used to produce that fuel. Keeping carbon out of the atmosphere therefore accounts for a significant part of the climate benefit. This distinction also indicates where a much larger proportion of public research funding should be concentrated. If the fundamental limitation of technological adaptation lies in the speed at which we can modify our extended phenotype relative to the speed at which we alter the climate, any technology that rapidly reduces emissions or permanently removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere directly influences that ratio. Research into capture, abatement and removal should therefore, from tomorrow onwards, be given a priority comparable to that which, at other times in history, we have accorded to scientific programmes considered strategic for collective security. The desired outcome is very concrete: to bring technologies that are currently still expensive to a point within a short timeframe where millions of facilities and entire economic systems can adopt them without turning climate protection into a privilege reserved for the wealthiest countries and individuals.

This is where techno-optimism can take on a legitimate meaning. Trust in technology makes sense when it becomes a deliberate programme to accelerate technological progress sufficiently to alter the system’s trajectory. A trust based on the idea that solutions will emerge spontaneously once the cost of damage becomes high enough assumes that the time required for innovation will remain shorter than the time available. It is precisely this assumption that climate change renders uncertain. The adaptation measures outlined by Boccaletti retain their full value within this framework. They are necessary because part of the change has already taken place and another part stems from processes that are now underway. Their function is to protect us during the transition and to reduce the damage we can no longer avoid. The possibility of relying on them for the entire response depends on the assumption that our technical and organisational capacity will be able to keep pace indefinitely with a disruption that we are simultaneously continuing to fuel. A policy that invests with the same urgency in slowing down the disruption changes the terms of the race, because it allows time for the very adaptation whose necessity Boccaletti describes so well. Added to this physical and technological limitation is a political one, stemming from the timescales within which democracies operate. A government must secure consensus within a few years, and the possibility of replacing it through elections is an essential condition of democratic alternation. Political decision-making therefore operates within a short time horizon, in which immediately perceptible costs and benefits that can be demonstrated before the next election carry great weight. Climate policies require continuity on an entirely different timescale. Decisions taken today on energy production or the structure of energy networks will have effects lasting for decades; research into carbon capture technologies that we fund today may become industrially decisive by the time the governments that funded it are a distant memory. The necessary transformation must therefore span different majorities without constantly losing its way. A climate policy designed to depend on the survival of a single political party is inherently fragile, because any change in government can turn that discontinuity into an immediate source of consensus.

Cost allocation raises the same issue. A transition that requires those with less to radically change their behaviour, whilst allowing those with more to continue emitting by paying a surcharge, creates a powerful political incentive that works against itself. The issue of fairness thus takes on a very practical consequence: a climate policy perceived as a system in which sacrifice is imposed according to one’s lack of income is unlikely to survive long enough to produce the results for which it was designed. The redistribution of costs and the affordability of low-emission alternatives are integral to the long-term stability of climate policy. This tension between political timescales and climate timescales takes on particular significance when viewed through the same evolutionary lens from which we began. Political competition, too, has its own ‘fitness’. Programmes, leaders and parties survive when they win votes. If a focus on the climate systematically reduces the likelihood of being elected, competition will tend to favour those who promise to downplay its importance. When voters value the continuity of climate policy and also judge its fairness, the landscape in which that competition takes place changes. The alternation of government remains intact but unfolds under an additional condition: those aspiring to govern must demonstrate that they have a credible response to this issue as well.

The climate crisis is, first and foremost, about this. Before it is a technology or a consumer choice, it must become a factor in political decision-making. There is also another difficulty, linked to the cost of the transition. The ability to foresee a crisis allows us to decide in advance what proportion of the costs we are prepared to bear; it offers no reason to expect those costs to disappear. A society that rapidly transforms its energy system must allocate resources to building new infrastructure, whilst some of the existing infrastructure loses value sooner than it would have done had it followed its previous trajectory. Entire economic sectors must shift their investments and skills, and a portion of the resources currently available is used to reshape the future. Innovation can reduce this cost significantly and can create benefits that extend beyond climate change. Precisely for this reason, funding research into carbon capture and removal also serves a social function: lowering the technical cost of the transition reduces the extent of the sacrifice that will need to be politically distributed. Politics remains responsible for how the residual cost is allocated, because emerging from a crisis requires allocating resources today to reduce future damage. The collective choice concerns which sacrifices to accept and according to what criteria to distribute them, knowing that the alternative is to accept, at a later date, costs imposed by processes over which we will have less control. This point is particularly important for the political stability of the transition. If citizens are promised that every transformation will immediately yield a benefit for everyone and require no sacrifice, the first visible cost becomes apparent proof that the entire project was deceptive. A sustainable policy must explain why certain resources are being diverted from the present and which future risk it aims to mitigate, whilst at the same time placing a greater share of the burden on those best able to bear it. The adaptive capacity of our extended phenotype also encounters a limit that stems precisely from its very power. A technological society is able to protect us because many systems cooperate continuously without us even realising it. The cooling of a building depends on the availability of electricity; that availability requires a grid capable of functioning during a peak in demand. Every new protective capability thus relies on other components of the system that must remain operational.

Complexity enhances the effectiveness of the extended phenotype whilst simultaneously increasing the number of conditions necessary for its functioning. When a disturbance passes through interdependent systems, the damage can spread far beyond its point of origin. The problem then takes on a recursive form: as climate pressure increases, so does the amount of adaptation we must build, whilst the damage caused by that very pressure consumes the capital and institutional capacity that would be needed to build it. A society forced to allocate an increasing share of its resources to repairing the present has less available to prepare for the future. For this reason, too, there is no guarantee that an arbitrarily large amount of climate change will be matched by an equally large amount of effective adaptation. Some limits can be pushed back by investing more resources; others may become physical or biological. Even before these limits are reached, the cost of maintaining the same level of safety may rise to the point where it competes with other essential needs of society. Finally, the global dimension introduces a problem of incentives. A community that builds flood defences reaps most of the benefit of its investment directly. A community that reduces emissions shares the climate benefit with the rest of the planet. Each country therefore has an immediate reason to invest in its own protection and a less immediate reason to bear the cost of global mitigation. A strategy based primarily on adaptation risks transforming this incentive into a situation where each country protects its own territory as best it can, whilst the factor causing the disruption continues to affect the whole.

This is where we need to start when discussing solutions.

The first is political because all the others depend on it. Climate must become one of the issues by which we measure the calibre of those who seek to govern us, with a continuity that transcends normal changes in government. Only we can bring this about. No market and no technology possesses an autonomous will capable of assigning climate this place amongst our collective priorities. The decision to fund, over decades, the research needed to make CO₂ removal economically viable, to mandate the reduction of emissions that are already avoidable, and to develop accessible alternatives to fossil fuels stems precisely from that will. For this reason, in the immediate term, a citizen’s political choice can have a far greater impact than the marginal savings achieved by changing a single consumer behaviour. One litre of petrol not burned prevents the emissions associated with that litre. An electorate that makes a coherent climate policy indispensable can determine which technology will be funded today and which will be cost-effective enough to be used on a large scale in twenty years’ time. Individual responsibility retains its significance; political responsibility shapes the framework that determines the opportunities available to individuals.

This approach encompasses the immediate adaptation measures outlined by Boccaletti. They are designed to help us navigate the years during which we will have to live with the effects that are already inevitable, and to protect people whilst the transformation takes place. They are, in the strictest sense of the term, a temporary response: they must buy time and minimise damage whilst we address the cause that determines our future trajectory. Ultimately, the deeper issue concerns the relationship between our species and the vast, extended phenotype it sustains. Eight billion human beings support a mass of artificial structures and production processes that require a continuous flow of free energy and matter. This flow enables us to maintain the organisation upon which our adaptive capacity depends, and inevitably results in dissipation. A civilisation cannot abolish its own entropic balance. Any complex system that maintains internal order must dissipate energy into the environment. The climate problem arises from the particular way in which, during our species’ industrial expansion, a huge proportion of this flow has been linked to the combustion of fossil carbon and the alteration of the global carbon cycle.

The necessary transformation therefore concerns the way in which we sustain our extended phenotype and the relationship between its growth, the material flow it requires, and the effects produced on the environment that sustains it. We must preserve, as far as possible, the adaptive capacity that technology has given us, whilst modifying the dissipative channels through which that capacity is sustained. Part of the work consists of replacing processes that introduce new fossil carbon into the atmospheric cycle; another part consists of capturing, before emission, what we are now able to intercept, whilst removal from the atmosphere must gradually become a technology capable of addressing the accumulated debt. Carbon recycling can close part of the production cycles and reduce the need to extract more, provided that the energy balance and the duration of storage make the climate benefit a reality. It is in this area that the future meaning of the term ‘technological adaptation’ will also be determined. If we invest primarily in technologies that protect us from the effects whilst allowing those capable of addressing the cause to progress more slowly, our extended phenotype will have to become more powerful every year simply to maintain the same capacity to protect us. If, on the other hand, research succeeds in rapidly reducing the cost of eliminating emissions and removing carbon that has already been released, the pace of the disruption itself will change, giving the remaining technology the time needed to adapt to what we have been unable to prevent.

This is where the problem of adaptation returns to square one. Evolution has given us a species capable of anticipating at least some of the future consequences of its own actions and of modifying its extended phenotype in advance. This capacity can, within certain limits, free us from the most ancient form of adaptation – the one in which the environment selects after the disturbance has occurred. For this to happen, we must slow down change enough to allow foresight to catch up with it, accept the necessary cost of doing so in the present, and build a sufficiently long-term political continuity to see the transformation through to completion. The projects highlighted by Boccaletti are a necessary part of this response, because they help us navigate the climate we have already created. Research capable of reducing emissions and removing from the atmosphere some of what we have accumulated there determines how quickly we will be able to stop producing new ones.

If we do not take this decision, the adaptation will continue regardless. But at that point it will no longer be the result of a conscious choice, but rather the blind outcome of a selection process that does not take our political preferences into account. This is why climate change must definitively move beyond being merely a sectoral or identity-based issue and become a structural variable in public discourse, capable of directly influencing the electoral success of any political force, regardless of its political persuasion. Not a partisan banner, but a condition for the legitimacy of government programmes. This transition also requires a change of pace. We cannot allow the debate to get bogged down in an endless sequence of postponements, distinctions and further delays. Urgency must itself become a political criterion: reducing emissions and carbon sequestration must be adopted as common, binding objectives, non-negotiable in their direction, even if open as to the methods. Only in this way will the climate issue cease to be perceived as a demand external to politics and instead become its core concern. We also know that the greatest benefits of this transformation will not necessarily be enjoyed by those who are called upon to make decisions today. But this is not an argument against taking action: it is the very essence of it. It has already happened in history that previous generations took decisions capable of shaping and determining the fate of subsequent generations. Today we find ourselves in that position once again. The difference is that this time we have a much clearer understanding of the consequences of inaction, and we no longer have the luxury of uncertainty.