The one-sentence truth: Climate change is a systems problem because emissions are dispersed across activities while harms accumulate across borders and generations.
Core vocabulary
Mitigation, adaptation, emissions, decarbonisation, resilience, transition risk, externality, climate vulnerability, intergenerational equity, carbon intensity.
Mitigation versus adaptation
Mitigation reduces the causes or magnitude of climate change. Adaptation reduces vulnerability to effects that occur. Most serious strategies require both.
Externalities
Emissions impose costs beyond the emitter, which is why private incentives can diverge from social costs.
Transition
Decarbonisation creates adjustment costs for firms, workers and consumers. Transition policy must consider pace, distribution and technological feasibility.
Resilience
Resilience concerns the ability of infrastructure, communities and economies to absorb shocks and recover.
Intergenerational equity
Climate policy distributes costs across time. Delayed action may lower present costs while increasing risks borne by future generations.
Example sentence
“Climate mitigation is difficult because the benefits are globally dispersed and long-term, while many transition costs are immediate and locally concentrated.”
Singapore application
Use density, coastal exposure, energy dependence, transport, buildings and economic openness to analyse mitigation and adaptation through specific mechanisms.
Continue the JC2 GP vocabulary system
Return to General Paper Vocabulary Year 2 (JC2) and Vocabulary for Junior College (JC1–JC2).
Final thought
Climate vocabulary becomes useful when it separates the physical problem from the political problem of distributing costs, risks and responsibility.