Crisis Adaptation, Opportunity Adaptation: Lessons from the Pastures and Fields of Mexico
Right now, as I write, I’m sitting in a huge exposition hall at a Mexican agricultural conference in the hard-working desert city of Chihuahua. Looking across the room, I see a lot of sun-dark skin under white-straw cowboy and “trucker” hats, illuminated by neon lights— farmers and ranchers from across the country. The organizers say more than three thousand are here in person, with thousands more online. They are here to be better: more productive, efficient, profitable. Where I grew up (which is not that far across the border), we’d say these folks are “the salt of the earth.” I don’t speak much useful Spanish, but otherwise Chihuahua feels much like home. (I wish I had my felt cowboy hat here!) These are good people and hard working, who wake up every day and try to do better for their families and communities.
They are also worried. The first talk is about global grain and meat markets — the US and Canada as neighbors, but also Ukraine (and Russia), Brazil, the EU, and China. The speaker delivers 45 minutes of hard truths under the harsh neon. He shows us faces of politicians and tables of commodity and fertilizer prices. How do growers compete profitably? Will Mexico’s exports be replaced by other producers? How can ranchers feed their livestock and maintain profits?
The salt of the earth here are feeling the cayenne-like burn of global economic, political , and climatic forces that are all concentrated in the mystery of global markets. My intuition is that the cowboy hats are listening closely, eager to learn something they can take home so they can do something, to see options and gain an edge. They want to work hard to grow wealth.
Chihuahua feels like part of a pattern over the past few weeks. I’ve just come back from meetings in London and Stockholm, and I’ve been traveling through Mexico for a few days already. Mostly I’ve been huddled in meeting rooms and cafes, connecting with companies, NGOs, national and regional governments, philanthropies (not necessarily salt of the earth). Many of these conversations have been with friends, but sometimes also new colleagues and partners. And in settings formal, casual, and accidental.
The discussion about climate adaptation is evolving. For most of my career, climate change has been about disasters. Supertyphoons and superdroughts, El Niños, catastrophic rain events, glacial outburst floods. What may be surprising is that climate scientists have traditionally seen climate change in more or less the same way, though in the softer language of “extreme events” and shocks and stressors.
What both groups share is a view that climate adaptation is a crisis discipline: our main task is to reduce risk, exposure, and sensitivity to climate shocks and stressors. We administer first aid. We are the ambulance.
I thought this way too for a long time. If adaptation is about crisis, you focus on people and ecosystems that are most hurt.
Perhaps the biggest problem with focusing on adaptation as a crisis is that crises never end, even if they keep changing. And we are all hurting now — or will be soon. Implicit in “crisis adaptation” is that we also want to revert to whatever things looked like before the problem.
And that’s a problem in itself. It keeps a farm alive but doesn’t make it profitable. You bring your cattle to market, but you lose money at the auction. The next spring you are still working, but your kids are planning to leave. You feel poorer.
What I have been hearing is that most of us have absorbed the message that climate impacts are here, they are moving quickly, and we’re not ready. We still need to deal with crisis, but that’s not enough.
In Stockholm, I was moderating a panel with some development bank staff, some researchers and analysts, and a senior manager from a global corporation with strong agricultural supply chains. And the manager said something really interesting: adaptation needs to address crises, but we also need to see the opportunity in resilience — how resilience helps us anticipate and invest. From almost of these conversations, water is flowing through the hazards of climate into the tall, cool glasses of adaptation and resilience.
“Opportunity adaptation” — should I say resilience? — seems as relevant to rural WASH as to it does to cattle ranchers or electrical utilities. Tomorrow, I give a talk about resilience to Chihuahua. I hope they take away something useful from a hatless gringo. I already have.
John “Juancito” Matthews
Chihuahua, Mexico