Adaptive design thinking can re-wire systems for success
There are many reasons why industrial climate disruption cannot simply be “solved” by one smart policy or by a coalition of the willing:
It is too big and complex a challenge; climate disruption is not a one-dimensional problem, where any one smart solution can complete the task.
Beyond that, both the climate system and the industrial systems that are disrupting it—energy, agriculture, transportation, waste, and manufacturing—touch nearly every aspect of human experience.
If the ten richest countries in the world, or the ten largest economies, or half the population of the world, but not the largest industrial economies, does everything right, pollution from the rest of the world will continue to add to the chemical disruption of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean. And yet, we need that cooperative action.
We are living with serious climate impacts that will persist, even after we stop making the problem worse.
Add to all of this the fact that there are serious challenges in creating enforcement mechanisms that will compel all industrial-scale actors, small farming communities, and governments, to do the right thing. The climate crisis can be successfully addressed, but achieving that will require something more complicated, participatory, and imaginative than simply adopting a new law, spending money, or deploying a miracle technology.
We need technologies; we need good policy; we need coherent, good faith regulation of polluting industries; and, we need investment. But none of these is sufficient on its own. We also need communities to have access to the benefits of the best available science—both the climate risk insights and the technologies and practices that can reduce that risk to zero, wherever possible.
We also need to go beyond solutions. We need adaptive design thinking—oriented toward adaptive management of future risks and shock events, and toward the likely need to adjust course, innovate, and rapidly re-orient policies and investments to avoid maladaptation.
The United States is facing record disaster costs this year linked to industrial climate disruption. Those costs have been rising for decades, intensifying especially in the last 10 years. Between September 2024 and January 2025, a span of just four months, just two major disasters—Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles fires—caused enough damage to eventually cost $250 billion each, over the coming 10 to 20 years.
Staple crops on which farming communities and everyday consumers depend are failing in regions as diverse as Pennsylvania and Osun State, Nigeria. Floods, droughts, and fires, are affecting regions as diverse as the Hindu Kush, New Jersey, and Siberia.
These climate impacts are not just an inconvenience for the affected communities and regions. They are infusing added cost into food prices, and projecting disaster-response costs across the whole economy. Meanwhile, most governments have no coherent national plan for addressing the problem of these proliferating cost of proportional climate risk.
As the community of nations gathers in Belém, Brazil, to hash out the next stage in cooperative climate crisis response, these adaptive design questions must inform negotiations:
Is public policy delivering funding and capability to local communities, to prepare for, reduce the risk of, and emerge quickly from shock events?
Are public investments supporting marginal, underserved, and vulnerable communities, to reduce overall systemic cost and impact?
Are climate and weather data systems being fine-tuned to provide real-time early warning and scenario tracking services?
Have interagency and multijurisdictional cooperative mechanisms been developed and deployed, to allow for rapid adaptive management?
Are intermediary services available locally to support vulnerability-sensitive risk reduction, insurance, and resilience-building?
As noted in the final line of the Transcending Crisis report:
Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.
This week, Mary Robinson and Álvaro Lario write in The Irish Times that “Women feed much of the world – producing as much as 80 per cent of food in developing countries,” and yet:
A recent FAO study found that female-headed rural households in low- and middle-income countries lose about $53 billion (€46 billion) more each year than male-headed households due to heat stress and floods combined. That is not only a loss of livelihoods but of education, nutrition and opportunity. Rural women are absorbing the risks that the financial system has failed to price – or to mitigate.
Ensuring women farmers—especially those working at small scale, who are intensely vulnerable and under-resourced—have greater climate-related financial and adaptive capacity support can stabilize local economies, minimize climate impact costs, and improve everyone’s chances of sustainable prosperity.
The international community also faces a particular additional roadblock: fiscal strain and stress limits what many governments are able to commit to. In both industrialized and developing economies, vulnerability-sensitive debt restructuring is necessary to create sufficient fiscal space to address worsening climate risk and impacts.
All of this adds up to a particular kind of design challenge:
Effective climate policies cannot be a simple one-time upgrade to an existing policy or program.
They need to create an operational context in which continuous adjustment, refinement, and innovation, are expected needs to which resources are assigned.
Agencies need to admit they cannot know exactly what needs will be most pressing in any given future year, and yet provide the means of responding appropriately.
In many countries, this will test the budgeting process, which can be highly political or involve entrenched interests.
One way to add agility is to invest in multilevel governance—allocate more resources to local communities and regions, to support locally rooted planning and relevant adaptive capacity.
Finally, the complex creative process of technical innovation needs support locally, regionally, and nationally. This will entail likely missteps and complications, but ongoing investment to drive local innovation and uptake of new practices is a better use of resources than comprehensive maladaptation or simply letting disasters do their worst.
Three more details need to inform decision-making around public finances and cooperative investment platforms:
All the money in the world is at stake. If the mainstream financial system fails—as the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Financial Stability Oversight Council have both projected—so will even the richest nations. Economy-wide climate investments are a wiser choice than worsening pervasive risk and cost and overall system failure.
We need a coalition of the willing to do everything possible to spread adaptive design thinking, planetary health and resilience insights, and the metrics, tools, and innovations needed, through multidimensional cooperative activities—even if they cannot “solve” the climate crisis on their own.
Treat local communities as insight-generators, not just as beneficiaries. Because the climate puzzle is not a one-dimensional challenge, there is a constant need to learn from both failures and successes. The more information we have about what works and what doesn’t, and why, the better prepared we will be to design better, adapt faster, and avoid unmanageable crisis and cost.