ABSTRACT
The words adaptation and mitigation have specific meanings in the context of climate change through their use in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Adaptation refers to the ‘adjustments that are possible in practices, processes, or structures of systems to projected or actual changes of climate. Adaptation can be spontaneous or planned, and can be carried out in response or in anticipation of change in climate conditions’ (Watson et al. 1996: 863). Mitigation is defined as ‘an anthropogenic intervention to reduce the emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases’ (Watson et al. 1996: 869). Adaptation has sometimes been used as a synonym for ‘human adjustment’ in the way people respond to the environmental hazards (Burton 2002). This is indeed the sense in which it applies to societal responses to climate change, the conscious altering of behaviour or our immediate environment to cope with changing conditions. One of the ways in which cities can adapt to climate change is to modify the intensity of the urban heat island by using trees and vegetation to shade the surface and provide evaporative cooling (Voogt 2002). However, the great natural contrasts in the climatic settings of the world’s urban areas should always be borne in mind. Although since 1950 the world’s cities have tended to look more and more like one another, with similar architecture, similar transportation and even similar clothing styles, the use of vegetation to adapt to climate change has to be locally specific to the regional climate and the intensity of the heat island effects in individual cities. Reliance on heating or cooling to keep building interiors at similar temperatures throughout the affluent parts of cities everywhere is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Reduction of these emissions can be a major form of urban adaptation to climate change. The actual strategy for emission reduction will vary from one city to another.
