Despite the prevailing focus on strategies to prevent or offset climate change - such as the Kyoto Protocol - the British government intends to publish a plan by the year's end for adapting to the changing climate.

[Fiona Reynolds, director-general of the National Trust] told the BBC: "In some areas where there is an increased risk of floods, we shan't be able to build our way out, and will have to adapt.

[...]

"We're talking about tens or even hundreds of metres of coastline disappearing over the next hundred years."

Since the plan hasn't been published yet there's obviously no way of evaluating its effectiveness, but I'm still pleased to see a government finally thinking about adaptation. We can talk about carbon sequestration and cutting CO₂ emissions all we want, but the fact is that CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for as long as 50-100 years. The relatively minimal warming we've seen so far is almost certainly only a whisper of what we can expect over the next several decades, and even a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions isn't going to suddenly fix everything. We have to be prepared to deal with already inevitable climatic changes.