Going by the literary meaning of the mitigation it says “the actions taken to reduce the severity” while that of adaptation means that “responsive adjustment to an environmental condition”. Climate change as we know it is not a localized phenomenon as it has spread its claws across the globe thanks to the activities of the most intelligent species. As far as mitigation measures in relation to climate change scenario could be divided into two categories (i) the steps taken in relation real life scenario, like disaster e.g. increased cyclone frequency in coastal areas (ii) steps which are taken on basis of assumptions/simulation e.g. building taller dykes in anticipation sea level rise in near future. While talking of adaptation; I believe it is having a long term consequence and affords greater protection to the communities over longer periods of time. Adaptation in general should have series of migratory steps to counter the disastrous effects of climate change. An example I would like to cite is in relation to floods. The adaptation steps should be like buildings on elevated pillars, providing people boats/ life jackets, cultivars of submerged rice, hydrophytes and also providing them regular training and drills so that get used to the conditions lying ahead of them.

Mitigation involves reducing the magnitude of climate change subdivided into two alternative strategies: emissions reductions and geoengineering, In crop science involves improved crop and grazing land management to increase soil carbon storage; restoration of cultivated peaty soils and degraded lands; improved rice cultivation techniques and livestock and manure management to reduce CH4 emissions; improved nitrogen fertilizer application techniques to reduce N2O emissions; dedicated energy crops to replace fossil fuel use; improved energy efficiency; improvements of crop yields

Adaptation involves efforts to limit our vulnerability to climate change impacts through various measures not necessarily dealing with the underlying cause of those impacts. In crop science require adjustment of planting dates and crop variety; crop relocation; improved land management, erosion control and soil protection through tree planting.

Going by the literary meaning of the mitigation it says “the actions taken to reduce the severity” while that of adaptation means that “responsive adjustment to an environmental condition”. Climate change as we know it is not a localized phenomenon as it has spread its claws across the globe thanks to the activities of the most intelligent species. As far as mitigation measures in relation to climate change scenario could be divided into two categories (i) the steps taken in relation real life scenario, like disaster e.g. increased cyclone frequency in coastal areas (ii) steps which are taken on basis of assumptions/simulation e.g. building taller dykes in anticipation sea level rise in near future. While talking of adaptation; I believe it is having a long term consequence and affords greater protection to the communities over longer periods of time. Adaptation in general should have series of migratory steps to counter the disastrous effects of climate change. An example I would like to cite is in relation to floods. The adaptation steps should be like buildings on elevated pillars, providing people boats/ life jackets, cultivars of submerged rice, hydrophytes and also providing them regular training and drills so that get used to the conditions lying ahead of them.

Dear friends

Thank you very much. Thus there are two categories of approaches to the climate change, by the name of mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is an action that limits global climate change through the reduction of green house gases emissions and enhancing the sink of them and adaptation is focused on the ability to adjust economic systems to the effects of climate change or to respond to its impacts, therefore please let me know which activities can we do in crop science and climate science to diminish the damaging effects of climate change?

Mohammad Kazemi

I guess Mohammad you can also see it from the point of view that mitigation is to be done to minimize the effects of climate change and adoption is a necessity for survival. But I guess you guys have defined it in a much better way already.

Dear Saif

Thank you so much for your opinion. If you familiar with methods of mitigation or adaptation, please say about them. Thanks a lot in advance.

Mohammad

Mitigation and adaptation are two major aspects for the handling of climate cahnge processes. In principle they are independent processes but in practice one may contribute to the other.

Mitigation includes all actions to reduce or eliminate drivers of climate change.

First on the list is reduction of greenhouse gas emissions beginning with CO2, CH4 and N2O. After that you have to consider other GHG such as CFCs already being phased out by the MOntreal Protocol, HCFCs also phased out and the current debate about HCF which also have extremely large GHG potentials, in the order of 1000 to 6000 equivalent to CO2.

Another major driver of climate change is land-use changes not only due to reduction in CO2 sinks but also because the changes modify the water cycle, precipitation run-off and evaporation and so on. Both forests and savannas are just as important in the climate system and as CO2 sink. Reforestation and land management is crucial. On the other hand care must be taken with aforestation since it has been shown that aforestation, in particular with certain non-native species (and for that matter reforestation), may also act as climate change drivers. Such is the case of eucalyptus aforestation in the Pampas region of South America (cf. work by Jobaggy). Given the scale and global distribution of emissions mitigation is primary responsability of major emitters. In small and medium emitters the optimization of energy uses and lad use/restoration on the one hand implies a contribution to the main mitigation effort but what is more important improves the economy and environmental/social issues if handled properly.

Adaptation includes all measures to allow current activities to continue under the best possible conditions given the changes resulting from climate change, i.e., reduce vulnerabilities. Adaptation actions must make societies more resilient to climate change.This is a wide and diverse issue because it includes almost every aspect of daily life and production. Adaptation can also be considered in ecosystem management. Food production and water management are two crucial areas which require adaptation. In some parts of the world adaptation may actually result in improved food production, However, unless climate change remains moderate the few benefits obtained by such favourable adaptations are absolutely offset by losses. In the same way as mitigation may lead to favourable changes adaptation may result in contributions to mitigation. While mitigation is a major responsability of the main emitters, adaptation is a must for the medium and small economy societies, in particular poor societies which are the most vulnerable. This is a major hurdel because resilience and vulnerability reduction includes overcoming current problems which are primarily societal issues, which are heavily impacted by climate change situations and extreme events. All societies are vulnerable to climate change and hence some kind of adaptation must be considered in all cases, but affluent societies have better access to the resources necessary to carry out adaptation. While it remains a major source of innternational debate, major economies who have profited most from past and current emissions involved in climate change do have an important responsibility towards those who primarily suffer the consequences of those emissions.

Mohammad: the merits of your question lie not just in coming up with appropriate definitions for these concepts, but also in responding to the ambiguity of using these words, which originate in our everyday life. It might be reasonable to use the meanings that these words have under the Climate Change Convention political deliberations as well as within IPCC. The above definitions that speak of mitigation as emissions reductions, and adaptation as measures to reduce vulnerability are, in general, in agreement with both the UNFCCC and the IPCC frameworks.

You might want to look at the IPCC documents at www.ipcc.ch, specially WG2 and WG3 reports.

Depending on the amplitude of your interests on adaptation, check the literature on human ecology and political ecology too.

I guess there are too manu descriptions provided, but to me these are two entirely different processes and comes at very different stages mitigation can be planned and done from the initation and adaption will come later as the changes happen.

ِDear scientists

You provided valuable feedback and I appreciate it. But on the basis of opinion of Diogenes, ambiguity inherent in the concept of mitigation and adaptation is cause of significant differences in the views.However, the definitions provided by IPCC may be accepted and lead to a consensus.

By the way I'd like to know more about activities can we do in crop science and climate science to diminish the damaging effects of climate change.

Thank you so much.

Mohammad

Adaptation helps in reducing vulnerability of people and ecosystems to climate changes and minimize cost of natural disasters. Adaptation, in the field of climate change, refers to actions taken to reduce the negative consequences of changes in the climate (e.g. switching to drought resistant crops, creating / protecting a coastal buffer zone, developing an effective early warning system, building flood barriers, extending insurance, etc.), or if possible to leverage any positive consequences that may result from such changes (e.g. growing climate sensitive crops like grapes in new areas, using land that was previously water-logged, increased water availability in certain places and times of year, etc.).

Mitigation reduces magnitude of climate change impact in long term. It include technical and management option

- to reduce GHG emission

- low-carbon rural path

- integration into broader environmental services

In the field of climate change, mitigation refers to actions taken to lower the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and thereby reduce the extent to which the global climate system changes relative to how we have know it to be in the recent past. Mitigation involves:

I. Reducing or eliminating emissions at the source (e.g. building a wind farm instead of a coal-fired power plant, reducing the number of aeroplane/ship/car journeys, avoiding deforestation, creating more energy efficient, energy neutral, or even energy producing buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.),

II. And/or sequestering greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (e.g. through planting more trees that absorb CO2, carbon capture and storage facilities at factories and power plants, stimulating additional sequestration into the ocean via plankton growth, etc.).

National and sub-national governments around the world are in various stages of making and passing rules on different mitigation targets, audits, standards, methods, etc. for their areas of jurisdiction.

Mitigation has global benefits (ancillary benefits might be realised at the local/regional level), although effective mitigation needs to involve a sufficient number of major greenhouse-gas emitters to foreclose leakage. Adaptation typically works on the scale of an impacted system, which is regional at best, but mostly local (although some adaptation might result in spill-overs across national boundaries, for example by changing international commodity prices in agricultural or forest-product markets).

Expressed as CO2-equivalents, emissions reductions achieved by different mitigation actions can be compared and if the costs of implementing the actions are known, their cost-effectiveness can be determined and compared. The benefits of adaptation are more difficult to express in a single metric, impeding comparisons between adaptation efforts. Moreover, as a result of the predominantly local or regional effect of adaptation, benefits of adaptation will be valued differently depending on the social, economic and political contexts within which they occur.

The benefits of mitigation carried out today will be evidenced in several decades because of the long residence time of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (ancillary benefits such as reduced air pollution are possible in the near term), whereas many adaptation measures would be effective immediately and yield benefits by reducing vulnerability to climate variability. As climate change continues, the benefits of adaptation (i.e., avoided damage) will increase over time. Thus there is a delay between incurring the costs of mitigation and realising its benefits from smaller climate change, while the time span between expenditures and returns of adaptation is usually much shorter.

Mitigation efforts can foster adaptive capacity if they eliminate market failures and distortions, as well as perverse subsidies that prevent actors from making decisions on the basis of the true social costs of the available options. The implications of adaptation can be both positive and negative for mitigation. For example, afforestation that is part of a regional adaptation strategy also makes a positive contribution to mitigation. In contrast, adaptation actions that require increased energy use from carbon-emitting sources (e.g., indoor cooling) would affect mitigation efforts negatively.

Dear Colleagues,

indeed a critical characteristic of climate change response actions in agriculture is the possibility to implement a large set of management actions that have both mitigation and adaptation benefits, ultimately supporting a region's rural development and food security goals while contributing to combating climate change.

This feature is indeed at the center of the current international debate on which role could agriculture play in post-2015 climate change agreements, building on how this specific feature can be used to channel significant climate funding for agriculture development.

I would like to suggest these two publications for further reading:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i2855e/i2855e.pdf

and

http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/suistainability/pdf/11_11_25_Tubiello_Sustainability_CC_webfile.pdf

Regards!

Adaptation refers to the ability of a system to adjust to climate change in order to reduce its vulnerability, and enhance the resilience to observed and anticipated impacts of climate change. Adaptation options include a wide set of approaches de-signed to reduce the vulnerability and enhance the adaptive capacity of agricultural systems to climate change. These options include engineering solutions that deal with climate-related risks, breeding for different environ-mental stresses, developing early warning systems, and establishing crop insurance systems. They also include arrange of farm management practices (such as soil and water conservation practices, crop diversification, and improved tillage practices) that make agricultural systems more resilient to climate change.

Mitigation refers to any strategy or action taken to remove the Greenhouse Gas (GHGs) released into the atmosphere, or to reduce their amount. Mitigation options for agriculture, in contrast, are generally divided into three broad categories of practices:

(1) Activities that increase carbon stocks above and below ground.

(2) Actions that reduce direct agricultural emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides) any-where in the lifecycle of agricultural production.

(3) Actions that prevent the deforestation and degradation of high-carbon ecosystems to establish new agricultural areas.

Adaptation benefit can be immediately visible as compare to mitigation but mitigation will have global benefit whereas adaptation benefit are from local to regional in scale

mitigation is geared towards reducing the adverse effects of climate change in this case (sometimes, even before the event occurs and at other times after. Adaptation on the other hand, is a longer term response to climate change effects.

Mitigation has been used in two main senses in the science of climate change. First, mitigation has been used to imply the action of reducing the magnitude of climate change through actions like reduction of carbon emissions, afforestation, and green energy campaigns. This is mitigation aimed at reducing increasing climate change. Mitigation has also been used to mean reduction of risks caused by climate change including risks related to floods and droughts, this type of mitigation is aimed at reducing disaster risks associated with climate change. Adaptation, on the other hand, is a long term process through which systems adjust to changing environmental conditions by changing their nature, means of survival or migrating. Mitigation measures and technologies for disaster risks associated with climate change drive the process of adaptation to a given environmental change but when they fail to work a migration or exterminantion my occur.

Initially mitigation was hoping to prevent dangerous CC from happening, later the intention was to reduce the impacts of CC and when scientists discovered that it is too late to prevent or at least to reduce the impacts in short and middle term dimensions attention shifted to adaptation, meaning to find ways to live with climate change. Mitigation still plays a role as in the long term it might be possible to revert changes that happen. Adaptation in form of energy alternatives also take into consideration that fossil fuels are anyway running out some time, so that for these reasons alternatives need to e found, which also might have positive impacts (at least long-term) on CC.

Another expression that is around is ‘coping’. Sometimes people use it in the some way as ‘adapting’, but if we look more precisely then ‘coping’ refers to more short term activities to deal with CC and might have even negative impacts in middle / long terms.

What this means for crop science refers in particular to adaptation, meaning to change to crops that are better adapted to changing environmental parameters, crops that are more drought resistant for locations where less rainfall is a result of climate change, or crops that can tolerate more humidity, when the opposite is happening. In this context one can also assume that in some contexts CC might have positive results, e.g. expanding production zones further towards the poles as longer warmer periods can be assumed for northern / southern temperate zones

Some literature that deals with these categories (except the various reports of the IPCC) are:

Wei-Yin Chen, Toshio Suzuki, Maximilian Lackner (eds.).Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Springer International Publishing           2017

Mukhtar Ahmed, Claudio O. Stockle (eds.) Quantification of Climate Variability, Adaptation and Mitigation for Agricultural Sustainability [1 ed.]. Springer International Publishing             2017

Walter Leal Filho (eds.) Climate Change Research at Universities: Addressing the Mitigation and Adaptation Challenges [1 ed.]. Springer International Publishing, 2017

Veerasamy Sejian, John Gaughan, Lance Baumgard, Cadaba Prasad (eds.) Climate Change Impact on Livestock: Adaptation and Mitigation [1 ed.], Springer India, 2015

Anita Wreford, Dominic Moran, Neil Adger, Climate Change and Agriculture: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation. OECD Publishing, 2010

Daniel Hillel, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Daniel Hillel, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Handbook of climate change and agroecosystems : the agricultural model intercomparison and improvement project integrated crop and economic assessments, Imperial College Press 2015

Adaptation and mitigation can both contribute to reducing the risks of climate change to nature and society.