On a local level, adaptation to climate change and variability – not only to abrupt climate change – is necessary to protect people. This does not mean that I believe mitigation to be irrelevant – mitigation and adaptation have to go hand in hand, but their spatial and temporal scales are very different.

Local mitigation actions are very much needed to minimize further changes in the global and thus regional climates. Nonetheless, those actions do not have an immediate impact on the climate - particularly not on the regional climate. The climate system only slowly reacts to changes in the radiative forcing. Reaching a new equilibrium state takes centuries to millennia. This means that even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions now, climate change will go on (with a lower rate) for a long time. So people - particularly those in vulnerable areas like coastal zones – will still be at risk and local adaptation actions might help to protect them. Those adaptation options often get active immediately or at least within a much shorter time span as compared to mitigation activities.

Putting all efforts on adaptation is neither THE solution, because if climate change goes on undamped we will certainly reach the limits of adaptation within the 21st century. Adaptation gets more difficult and more expensive for larger rates of global warming. It even gets impossible for some (natural) systems. Crossing some tipping points in the climate system may aggravate the changes to a level that is not manageable on a planet with seven billion people. Furthermore, the adaptive capacity is very unevenly distributed across and within societies. Those with the least resources having the lowest capacity to adapt are often those most severely endangered by climatic changes.

Adaptation and mitigation are complementary to each other and we should not disregard one of them.

Actually, mitigation efforts i.e. reducing pollution is grossly unevenly spread that it is almost non-existent in developing countries, and knowing that the environment is a continuum, mitigation efforts are unlikely to yield results anytime soon.

In essence it seems that adaptation is the only option, but again developing countries are grossly disadvantaged. Even the developed countries with all the predictive technology are limited in the loss of lives and property experienced. The better thing is that every society can adapt at their own scale and pace.

Having been invited to Louisiana State University in October to speak, I am proposing that persistent loss of coastal wetlands, the pollution of estuaries, an accelerating rate of rising sea-level, and the centrality of estuarine marshes to coastal productivity combine to make protection and restoration of tidal marshes an effective means for adapting to converging consequences of abrupt climate change, population growth, and increasingly costly risks of property loss.

Coastal and estuarine marshes are essential, yet threatened places at the forefront of adaptive responses to accelerating changes. Simultaneously increasingly dense populations are on a collision course with unpredictably rising seas that are flooding vulnerable urban and agricultural settlements by the sea. While restoration of marshes along the entire watershed are of significant means of improving water quality and mitigating water pollution from upland run off of pesticides, herbicides, and persistent organic pollutants, the revival of estuarine flood lands are vital to the recovery of fisheries and the protection of international migratory and resident bird populations.

Thus mitigation must go hand in glove to adaptation. Literally the glove of adaptive responses protects the vital capabilities of the hand of mitigation. But figuratively, of course, two strategies must complement one another to achieve a desired outcome of together reducing pollution and responding justly and effectively to protecting people's lives, investments, and property that are astride the rising ocean tides.

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