In the 1980s, the government of the United Kingdom introduced financial incentives to promote plantation forestry. Landowners were encouraged, via tax breaks, to cover seemingly “unproductive” peatlands with uniform stands of trees for timber harvest. As a result of this policy and others, about 80 percent of UK peatlands were degraded or destroyed. “It was a disaster from a climate change perspective, as well as from a biodiversity perspective,” says Peter Smith, a soil and climate scientist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.  

Peatlands are critical landscapes for greenhouse gas storage, explains Smith. They are sinks of undecayed organic matter, holding onto millennia of carbon dioxide and methane that would otherwise be in the atmosphere. When the UK’s peat was drained and planted with trees, the land went from carbon sink to source. It was an environmental mistake, like so many, made in the name of maximizing profit. And it’s one that the UK’s government vowed to correct and not repeat. Yet, as recently as 2020, the Forestry Commission allowed peatland to be drained for tree planting.

And it’s a mistake that’s been replicated elsewhere. In Indonesia, for example, US biofuel policy meant to reduce carbon emissions led to the transformation of peatland into oil palm plantations and mass carbon release. Somehow, a land-use shift known to increase atmospheric greenhouse gas was deployed with the specific intent of doing the opposite. Of course, it backfired. 

In March, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Working Group II report was released. This month, the IPCC released the third and final segment of the Sixth Assessment. In part, the IPCC emphasized what’s already widely known: We’ve been running down the clock on climate change for decades, and the scale of the problem has never been clearer. But amid the grim news of temperature rise, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather, there was also a secondary warning: Not every attempt to tackle climate change and its effects is a good thing. Even with the best intentions, people can make things worse.

There are two ways for us to productively respond to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to limit warming. Adaptation, on the other hand, is changing something about our behavior, society, or environment to accommodate the alterations wrought by climate change. For people and biodiversity to thrive, we need both strategies. Yet both can go very wrong. 

Peatland conversion in Indonesia is one example of counterproductive mitigation. To observe counterproductive adaptation, or “maladaptation,” look no further than the American West, says Camille Parmesan, an IPCC scientist and Make Our Planet Great Again laureate at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “One of the clearest maladaptations globally, and also in the US, is fire suppression,” she says. 

Centuries of putting out fires on landscapes that coevolved with fire has left a buildup of fuel waiting to burn, making western wildfires much worse in recent decades, says David Calkin, a wildfire and forestry researcher for the US Forest Service. “Climate change accelerates the consequences from that.” More warming means more fires, which brings on more suppression and, in turn, even more fires.

As climate change has increased drought severity and the number of extreme weather events, the prevailing response continues to be fire suppression. Just this month, two California House representatives introduced a bill to Congress that would require all wildfires on National Forest land to be actively suppressed within 24 hours of detection. “If we continue just nothing but aggressive suppression, there's still going to be massive fires and failures in the system,” says Calkin. What we need instead is active fire management, he says. Many more prescribed burns, and a policy of letting fires run their course where people and homes aren’t at risk, are the best ways to restore balance to fire-dependent ecosystems. One of the best defenses against the spread of wildfire, explains Calkin, is a fire scar from past years. 

Just as fire suppression can be a short-sighted response leading to even bigger, long-term challenges, so too can infrastructure projects like sea walls, which have hard climate limits. If sea level rise or storm surges exceed sea wall capacity, as is likely under continued warming, the barriers quickly become expensive failures. In Manhattan, construction on a controversial sea wall began late last year. Initially, the coastal protection plan was meant to emphasize wetland restoration over fixed barriers, but the final outcome will be a six-mile-long wall that local residents say exacerbates existing inequality by leveling their neighborhood greenspace.

Amplified injustice is a hallmark of maladaptation, says Lisa Schipper, a climate change and human development researcher at Oxford University and an IPCC author. It’s also a devastating outcome when climate change already poses the biggest threat to already marginalized people in the US and globally. 

In Ghana’s Volta River estuary, for instance, the government built a coastal defense system, meant to reverse the erosion washing away the shore and reduce flooding. But instead of helping the community living behind the barrier, it increased their risk of displacement via resort developers who saw the reinforced land as more desirable and disrupted locals’ ability to fish, says Kwame Owusu-Daaku, a sustainable development researcher at the University of West Florida. The community had been inching farther inland in response to flooding for years, explains Owusu-Daaku. But by building sea walls and enacting a plan without consulting the people most likely to be affected, “we accelerated that process and made it more inequitable for them,” he says.

Over and over, we keep making the same mistakes, but to move forward into a better future, we need to learn from them and change fast, says Schipper. “We have to take all these lessons on board really quickly. The time is so, so tight. Every choice we make now [matters]. Every increment of warming is reducing the opportunities we have for adaptation and climate-resilient development.”

“The glimmer of hope lies in the fact that we already see what we're doing wrong, so that we can try to avoid it.”