Going beyond mitigation : the urgent need to include adaptation measures to combat climate change In China

With the release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ('IPCC'), it is clearer that global climate change is already a reality, and future warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases ('GHGs') is probably unavoidable. As a developing country with a large population, low level of economic development, and a fragile ecological environment, China is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Changes within China include increased average temperatures, rising sea-levels, glacial retreat, reduced annual precipitation in north and northeast China, and significant increases in southern and north-west China. Extreme climatic events and hydrological events such as floods and droughts are projected to become more frequent in the future, and water resource scarcity will continue across the country. These threats are particularly pressing in agriculture and animal husbandry, forestry, natural ecological systems and water resources, and in coastal and ecologically fragile zones. Mitigation and adaptation are widely recognised as two related but distinct methods designed to address climate change. However, until recently the focus of debate about global climate change has been on the mitigation of GHG emissions, while adaptation was put aside. In these circumstances China has put a lot of effort into mitigation by the way of energy reforms, GHG emission reduction, industry improvement and development of mode transformation. This article will particularly focus on climate change adaptation brought to the foreground as a result of the international community's abject failure to resolve a number of critical issues at the United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change ('UNFCCC') meeting of world leaders in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009. The failure of the Copenhagen summit together with the failure by negotiators at the subsequent Conference of the Parties' meeting at Cancun, Mexico and the recently concluded meeting in Durban, South Africa to reach a binding agreement on the reduction of GHG emissions has dashed any realistic hope of meeting the target of limiting global warming to a rise in temperature of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Given the physical attributes of GHG, which will remain in the atmosphere long after they were emitted, the warming phenomenon will not be reversed for at least one century even if we stop emitting GHG immediately. Therefore, the critical issue here is how to adapt to this unchangeable situation.