Climatic Change http://doi.org/vj2 (2014)

Adaptation and mitigation are conceptually complementary strategies for minimizing climate change impacts. Whether these approaches are, in practice, treated in an integrated way is another question. This is potentially important because failure to join up strategies could lead to policy conflicts.

Pam Berry from the University of Oxford and co-workers searched for literature-based evidence of interactions between adaptation and mitigation measures across a number of sectors (agriculture, biodiversity, coasts, forests, urban and water). Focusing on Europe, they found that adaptation and mitigation interactions were rarely explicitly mentioned within a single sector, let alone between sectors. Nevertheless, they also found that most measures did have some effect (positive, neutral or negative) on another sector. Many of the positive cross-sectoral interactions identified involved water and/or biodiversity, so the authors suggested these as potentially good starting places for the implementation of integrated, cross-sectoral strategies. They concluded that many local-scale measures could facilitate integration between both adaptation and mitigation, but that this requires explicit recognition of these cross-sectoral interactions of adaptation and mitigation measures.