Expert Comment: Professor Jonatan Pinkse, Executive Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester.

This article is written as part of #CoveringClimateNow – a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate emergency.

What the Stern Report did in 2006 for climate mitigation and the need to reduce carbon emissions, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon now tries to do for climate adaptation: Show the numbers! This week, the Global Commission on Adaptation that Ban Ki-moon founded together with Bill Gates and Kristalina Georgieva of the World Bank, published its Adapt Now report, stating that investing $1.8 trillion in climate adaptation now will lead to a total of up to up to $7.1 trillion in net benefits. The message is clear, investing in climate adaptation to better cope with extreme weather and rising sea levels makes economic sense. But why are we not doing it then?

The climate emergency might be grabbing the headlines, lots of confusion remains about terms like mitigation and adaptation and the difference between them. People have always felt uncomfortable to admit the need for adaptation, as it could be seen as no longer trying to push for mitigation and reduce carbon emissions. Still, while the climate policy has long discussed mitigation and adaptation both as necessary responses, the business world has been much slower to acknowledge adaptation as a strategy to tackle climate change.

Adaptation is a confusing concept for business. Often, when managers talk about how they do adaptation, they will explain how they are improving their carbon footprint. But this is mitigation. And when you explain what we mean by adaptation, every manager will tell you that their business is always adapting to changes in the environment, also those related to weather and climate. Food producers, insurance companies, they all monitor weather patterns and analyze how any changes might affect their assets. It is part of business-as-usual.