ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that the growing awareness that emissions should be reduced and climate change impacts should be simultaneously managed has created an opportunity to revive the traditional development and humanitarian agenda. It discusses the two important cases: climate change adaptation and forest policies grouped under the concept of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). Prior to becoming an important point of negotiation during 21st Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention (COP21) in Paris, the concept of adaptation was a progressive scientific and political construction within the climate regime. Adaptation would be an extension of charity and development aid, rather than compensation, and thusly Northern countries' taxpayers would be no longer polluters but instead generous donors helping poor people to face a changing climate whose cause is blurred. Adaptation suffered from a taboo until the late 1990s, for reasons related both to contentious international relations and different framings opposing "adaptationists", "limitationists" and "realists".
