How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate
Susannah Fisher's new book "Sink or Swim" on climate adaptation, moral grief, and why hope still matters even when it’s too late to “solve” climate change
This is a summary of episode 373 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to enjoy podcasts.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Adaptation ≠ surrender: Fisher insists adaptation isn’t giving up. It’s a necessary evolution of our response to climate change, helping people reimagine livable futures even in overshoot.
Every fraction of a degree counts: The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C isn’t symbolic: it’s life and death for millions. There’s no binary between success and failure.
From mitigation to adaptation: Ross reflects on the emotional whiplash of shifting from carbon removal’s optimism to adaptation’s realism. Fisher offers tools for resilience and acceptance.
Two futures: Fortress societies that hoard security, or cooperative ones that redesign the social contract around shared risk. Which we get depends on politics and compassion.
Migration and hospitality: Fisher highlights hopeful examples of humane regional migration systems, such as Caribbean disaster protocols and Tuvalu–Australia agreements.
Beyond doom: “We can always stop it getting worse,” she says. Even amid setbacks and political regression, progress is cumulative — not all or nothing.
Personal ethics in crisis: Ross asks: Should we move our families to safer regions—or stay and help where we’re most needed? Fisher doesn’t offer easy answers, but insists moral clarity requires empathy and self-knowledge.
The invisible frontiers: She names overlooked adaptation issues: the role of the military, the adaptation of nature itself, and the politics of land use and agriculture.
Farmers, fairness, and reform: Acknowledging that agricultural resistance isn’t stubbornness but survival, Fisher argues for “just transitions” in land use and subsidies.
Hope as politics: Fisher ends with Christiana Figueres’ concept of “stubborn optimism”; not naïve, but gritty, grounded, and disciplined.
📝 Beyond the Point of No Return
When Ross Kenyon sits down with Dr. Susannah Fisher, the conversation begins with an admission: working on adaptation feels different than working on carbon removal. Carbon removal holds a kind of heroic optimism—that we can pull back from the brink. Adaptation accepts that we’ve gone over the edge, and asks how we live there.
Fisher, a leading scholar and author on climate adaptation, understands the grief in that shift. But she’s careful to reframe it.
The idea isn’t to “win” or “lose” the climate crisis. It’s to make sure it doesn’t get worse than it has to. That, she insists, is still a victory worth fighting for.
🌊 The Politics of Overshoot
Adaptation, Fisher argues, isn’t the same as surrender. It’s an acknowledgment that the world we live in is already changing, and that people, especially in the Global South, need systems that help them survive and redefine their futures.
That includes acknowledging the politics of overshoot: rising temperatures will amplify disasters, trigger migration, and stress political systems. Without foresight, she warns, this could lead to “Fortress America” and “Fortress Europe”scenarios: isolationist responses that deepen global inequality.
But Fisher insists other paths are possible. Regional migration compacts in the Caribbean and climate-visa arrangements between Tuvalu and Australia show what humane adaptation could look like.
🧭 Personal Adaptation: Where Do You Live a Good Life?
The interview turns inward. Ross wonders whether moral people should stay in high-risk areas to help or move their families to safer ground. “If I flee to safety,” he muses, “am I abandoning the places where I could do the most good?”
Fisher doesn’t offer absolutes. She admits her own privilege living behind the Thames Barrier in London but acknowledges how personal these choices are. “You weigh your risks,” she says. “But we also have to think about climate gentrification — who gets left behind when the safe zones fill up?”
He likens it to education or healthcare: the tension between doing what’s best for your own and what’s best for the collective. There are no clean answers, only trade-offs we have to face honestly.
🪖 The Military, Nature, and Other Blind Spots
Some of the most striking parts of Fisher’s book deal with what she calls the invisible frontiers of adaptation:
Militarization of disaster response: Armies are already being repurposed for flood relief, firefighting, and emergency logistics; a pragmatic shift that raises ethical questions about who benefits and who’s excluded.
Nature’s adaptation: Climate change forces ecosystems to move; species shifting northward or uphill in search of survivable temperatures. Adaptation must include helping nature adapt, not just humans.
Land use and agriculture: Reforming agricultural subsidies is “tricky business,” she says with British understatement. Farmers aren’t villains; they’re struggling. Any transition must feel fair.
Ross and Fisher agree that real adaptation will require empathy and negotiation, not moral bludgeons.
🌾 Just Transitions and Political Timeframes
Adaptation, Fisher notes, runs on long timelines with decades of planning, coordination, and investment. Politics doesn’t. That’s the core dilemma: long-term risk management rarely wins short-term elections.
She points to ideas like independent climate committees (the UK’s Climate Change Committee) or youth advisory councils to extend policy time horizons. But ultimately, she says, adaptation must connect to things people already care about: jobs, security, food, and dignity.
🕊️ Moral Leadership and Stubborn Optimism
In the final stretch, Ross and Fisher trade ideas about leadership, from monarchs to movie stars. The royals’ eco-activism may not resonate with ordinary people, Fisher admits, but “we’ll need unconventional leaders, anyone who can shift moral tone.”
She calls for “stubborn optimism,” not the easy kind that denies pain but the kind that keeps showing up anyway. Adaptation work, she says, demands both empathy and endurance, a politics of grief that refuses to calcify into despair.
🌱 Final Reflection
In Fisher’s framing, adaptation is neither failure nor fallback. It’s a practice of courage to keep working, keep helping, and keep imagining better futures even when the world doesn’t reward you for it.
“Every fraction of a degree counts,” she repeats.
“We can always stop it getting worse.”
The shift from mitigation to adaptaton is hard to swallow but necesary. We need both strategies running in paralel now, not one or the other.