Lost in Translation? Results From the Adaptation vs Resilience Survey

Adaptation and resilience has a language barrier to overcome. The world is slowly burning up and millions of lives — not to mention trillions of dollars in economic output — are forfeit if humanity fails to prepare, protect, and plan to recover from climate shocks. Yet advocates continue to give mixed messages as to what ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’ actually mean.

Let’s take New York Climate Week as an example. Climate Proof and partners ran an event called ‘Adaptation in Action’ on the Monday. On the Thursday, a host of organizations presided over ‘Resilience Finance Day’. Then on Saturday, a gaggle of techies convened for an ‘Adaptation & Resilience Hackathon’. Were all these events talking about the same thing from different perspectives — or about different things altogether? Often, it’s too hard to tell.

Moreover, certain phrasings — like “climate adaptation tech” and “resilience dividend” —circulate more broadly in some communities than others, giving rise to a sense that different ‘factions’ are speaking past one another. 

In an attempt to break through the confusion, Climate Proof ran a reader survey last month addressing perceptions of ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’. We asked subscribers how they personally define each term, and how they think other stakeholder groups understand them.

The results highlight the multifaceted — and at times contradictory — ways in which these words are understood. But they also reveal a potential path toward a shared language that could make future policy discussions, investment strategies, and start-up plans more coherent and productive.

💡Scroll to the bottom of the article for a downloadable PDF containing all the survey data