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Should all countries take both mitigation and adaptation steps to deal with climate change? Dawei 9C2
I
deally, all countries should be able to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. This would be the most efficient way of solving the problem, as we could prevent the future implications of climate change, while adapting to overcome the current consequences. However, this is not entirely possible, as many countries are hindered by limiting factors such as time and lack of money. For example, a poor LEDC that desperately needs water would not have the money or workforce required to build massive reservoirs to store water. Therefore, I believe that a more realistic and fair solution would be for every country to focus on mitigating climate change, but with the prerequisite that all countries that have higher greenhouse
gas emissions should focus more on mitigation, whilst developing countries should firstly focus on shifting their economies towards greener practices. The countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions, such as China or the US, should primarily focus on mitigating climate change. They could do this by adopting renewable energy sources; replanting trees; halting deforestation; and conserving energy. I believe that these countries should focus on mitigation because they are the largest contributors to climate change, and so have the ‘most room for improvement.’ If they cut down greenhouse gas emissions by just 10%, the massive decrease in emissions would be proportionally larger than any low emission
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country. Meanwhile, those low emission countries could focus on adapting their own economies to combat climate change. However, this would be very costly, especially for poor LEDCs. Therefore, the wealthier MEDCs would ideally donate money to help the LEDCs adapt. This would cause some issues though, since these MEDCs also require money to spend on their own mitigation methods, whist adapting at the same time. Overall, I believe that this is a complex problem with no absolute solution, however, I strongly believe that the highest contributors to climate change should be doing far more to mitigate it than the low emission countries that don’t contribute much.
