Integrating climate mitigation and adaptation: a new framework for achieving ‘climate resilient net zero’ in preparing for heat risk

The integration of climate change mitigation and adaptation policy – or ‘climate policy integration’ (CPI) – is key to mainstreaming and harmonising both of these crucial strands of action in policy responses to climate change worldwide. However, little is known about how CPI can be applied in practice beyond single policy areas. This paper addresses this gap by considering how CPI can be better implemented in the context of responding to extreme heat, a climate change impact and risk that is growing in international importance.

Using the heatwaves that occurred in the UK during the summer of 2022 as a case study, the paper explores the extent to which key stakeholders consider the integration of adaptation and mitigation to be important; perceptions of the feasibility of such integration; and the main enablers and challenges associated with integrating adaptation and mitigation. They find appetite for integrating mitigation and adaptation but a lack of integration happening in practice.

Key points for decision-makers

• Mitigation and adaptation strategies historically have been developed separately with the two processes often treated in isolation and this fragmentation extends to funding and implementation of policies.
• There is currently limited research that considers integrating mitigation and adaptation for heat risk resilience.
• The authors carried out 38 interviews and held four focus groups with policymakers, first responders, utilities providers, and civil society organisations responsible for managing heat risk in the UK to understand this challenge and how it is perceived. These practitioners were involved in the response to the heatwaves of summer 2022, when temperatures exceeded 40^oC in England for the first time on record.
• These key practitioners considered the integration of mitigation and adaptation both important to addressing heat risk and feasible. However, this integration is not yet being implemented.
• The authors present a new framework with international and multi-contextual significance, highlighting the convergence of five key elements integral to realising effective climate policy integration: i) challenges and ii) support to integration, iii) different framings of the issue, iv) the degree of importance stakeholders afford integration, and v) how possible integration is.
• They conclude that unless all five factors are fully addressed by researchers and decision-makers when tackling and understanding heat risk, new problems may emerge.
• They find that positioning the need for integration as a requirement for a ‘climate resilient net zero’ future was more effective than focusing on ‘integration’ itself. ‘Climate resilient net zero’ can be described as a future where emissions are brought to net zero and at the same time there is adequate adaptation to climate change impacts, creating a resilient society and economy.
• The authors also draw attention to the shortsighted approach to adaptation policy in the UK and worldwide which sees this area of climate policy treated as an add-on to mitigation policy; this will have increasingly serious repercussions as the impacts of climate change intensify unless rectified.