Adaptation, Mitigation, and Trust in Climate Services
Gabriel Târziu
12 February 2026
There are strong indications that anticipatory adaptation is increasingly displacing mitigation as the primary policy response to climate change. The aim of this talk is to argue that this emerging policy shift is deeply problematic. I approach the issue by focusing on an important feature of science-based policymaking: scientific guidance does not always converge on a single policy direction. Different scientific “voices” can generate policy-competitive directions, much as prevention-oriented and treatment-oriented sciences in public health can point toward divergent courses of action. In such contexts, policymakers must decide which scientific voice to treat as action-guiding, thereby exposing themselves to different kinds of epistemic and practical risk. Starting from this observation, I develop an inductive-risk-inspired normative principle for policy reliance on scientific outputs. I then apply this principle to the mitigation–adaptation choice. I argue that anticipatory adaptation depends heavily on climate-service products that are epistemically fragile, being characterized by high uncertainty, sign ambiguity, and susceptibility to contradictory projections at decision-relevant spatial and temporal scales. Errors arising from reliance on such guidance are therefore more likely to result in maladaptation than errors associated with mitigation-relevant climate science. I conclude that the growing policy emphasis on anticipatory adaptation cannot be justified by responsible inductive-risk reasoning and instead reflects a systematic misallocation of epistemic trust.
