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As you may have noticed, since you’re reading this, provocative titles drive readership. Why? Because words matter, and people pay attention to words when those words don’t melt into the same ol’ same ol’ drone of technocratic chatter.

In our work, we constantly struggle to use language as a tool to communicate, rather than simply as an artifact to convey that work of some sort has happened. Often this means that we must struggle to define a grammar and vocabulary for our clients that is effective but not foreign. And, occasionally, we find that only once you’ve spent a significant amount of time and energy around a concept embodied in a particular word do you realize you no longer believe in the power of that word to express what is really going on. “Sustainability” is one such word.

Sustainability is used contemporaneously to describe an approach, primarily to the environment, but often to larger social issues, that emphasizes conservation, remediation, and prevention. It has been embraced primarily by companies seeking a way to respond to the growing social, political, and occasionally economic incentives to examine the effects business-as-usual have on the communities and ecosystems within which those companies are embedded.

Regardless of whether or not companies ought to be concerned with larger environmental or social issues, and I think it is unequivocally the case that they should, I’ve come to believe that we’ve been operating in the wrong frame. In fact, I think much of the current disagreement about what to do about climate change and global warming has less to do with fundamentals (although I don’t deny there continue to be seemingly unbridgeable gaps between parties), and much more with how we’ve constructed the dialogue, or if you prefer, the argument.

Here’s where we return to the importance of language. It can’t be about “sustainability”. Companies are, by their very nature, concerned about sustainability: they always have been. They are perhaps much more aware than many of their erstwhile detractors of the need to ensure that the resources they depend on continue to be available. Coke, or Nestle, or Unilever know very well the dangers of diminishing or unusable water supplies. It may be true, that for them it is not necessarily about quality of life for people living along rivers or over aquifers, but rather whether or not they can continue to profitably do what they do. The effect, however, is much the same.

Companies, markets, nations don’t succeed by simply sustaining. It’s the wrong word – it’s the wrong idea.

It is a challenging time on many fronts, and the language we use to describe those challenges and our responses to them will either create shared meaning and endeavor or misunderstanding and divisiveness. Instead of the misunderstood, misappropriated, and misused term of sustainability, perhaps instead we ought to focus on adaptability and resilience as our common touchstones.

Adaptability is a well-understood word, meaning to be able to adjust to new circumstances or conditions. It has been applied frequently to describe (among other things) American business’s approach to innovation, to changing market conditions, and to social pressures. The Internet, globalism, and the green movement are all perfectly good examples. Climate change and global warming represent another and new variable for businesses looking seriously at adapting for their future.

Unlike sustainability, which has mostly been about mitigation and cessation, adaptability suggests reinvention, innovation, new ways to accomplish new things. CEOs the world over know that their adaptability in the face of changing circumstances and an uncertain future will determine which companies are winners and which are losers.

Resilience, similarly, is the capacity to withstand and recover from difficult conditions, again something American business has demonstrated its ability to do time and time again. Changing environmental conditions and the attendant pressures such changes will place on the way companies do business, and on their customers, will require enormous resilience.

While sustainability downplays the power of resistance and recovery and submits both to unwavering external forces, resilience offers a way to accommodate, integrate, and then transform circumstances from possible – even probable – failure to success. Corporate leaders know the power of resilience, and – with some notable exceptions – have been building organizations that can respond quickly and successfully to external pressure.

Climate change and global warming will force companies to be both adaptable and resilient, perhaps on a scale – both temporally and economically – greater than ever before. Interestingly, adaptability and resilience are what we look for in ecosystems to determine if they are healthy. They serve as indicators of systems in balance. And unlike sustainability, both resilience and adaptability are open-ended and unconstrained. They don’t suggest anything other than successful evolution. Indeed, if companies were universally both resilient and adaptable, the world would be considerably better off than status quo.

Adaptability and resilience don’t offer, it is true, as pithy a term as sustainability. But, at the same time, they don’t obfuscate, don’t misdirect, and they do point towards what is truly needed. And, in these times, a little more subtly and a little more shared meaning, even at the cost of a couple of more words, is probably a good thing.

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The five issues I’ve highlighted below – wetland management, electricity markets, internal migration, water management, and rural revitalization -  all present significant challenges to policy makers at mid-century, and to those of today looking forward. Each comes about thorough a common constellation of trends that we’re already tracking.  And, while these five certainly don’t represent the entire spectrum of policy concerns, they are good representatives of the range of issues that are likely to be important.

1. Wetland management – Gradually rising sea levels, although not as dramatic as expected at the early part of the century, began having noticeable impact by 2025. The early concerns about the loss of wetlands to development and flood control lessened initially as the wetlands reconstituted in some places and grew larger in others. By 2040, however, tensions between metropolitan sea level managers in cities like Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, New York, Boston, and San Diego and proponents of so-called natural control had intensified. Over the next ten years, both sides turned – mostly unsuccessfully – to the courts and legislatures in an effort to meet the growing challenges. Late in 2049, after two years of quiet but universally praised work, the President’s Panel on Rising Sea Levels (known by almost everybody as The Flood Commission) issued their report. First among the 312 recommendations was the critical need for a federal response.

2. Electricity markets – When Tangier – the Cisco/Edison Power joint venture – completed regional testing of its new grid in 2017, the most noticeable result was not that the grid had worked, but the virtual marketplace that had grown out of the venture’s social marketing efforts. By 2031, 3/4 of the country was in a position to market electricity back to providers, and the virtual marketplaces that had so captured the attention of the media and pundits in the 20s, had morphed into fully operational exchanges. As renewables and nontraditionals were integrated, the exchanges moved beyond the buying and selling of kWh to futures and derivatives. In November 2048, four traders working out of AllianZ’s offices in Des Moines – responding to internal modeling data -  began shorting the nuclear transmission market. One of the traders – a late hire to the firm – leaked the action to his local exchange. Hundreds of thousands of households dumped nuctrans credits, sending the market into a spiral. After three days of turmoil, with plants burning off excess energy, and the national reserve teetering on unsustainable, the SEC called a halt to the markets. Independent analysis failed to predict a way to safely reopen over the New Year holiday, and by ’49 it was clear that a different sort of regulation was necessary – able to balance the energy needs of the country with the embedded market.

3. Internal migration – Although Palm Springs had been suffering since the conservation acts of 2021, strict water reuse programs and the award to the city of the first NatEnviro landscaping certification in California for its wide-scale xenoscaping had done much to ensure continued prosperity. When the Western Fires began in 2039, the citizens watched as town after town across the southwest was consumed. The acres of dead vegetation, harvested after the passage of the conservation acts, had been used for sand and dust dampening. As gray water sources diminished, the already depleted fresh water aquifers simply couldn’t keep up. By October, huge sections of the region had been depopulated. On November 3rd, Palm Springs evacuated. Former residents fleeing to cities further north, and further east, found themselves in communities of refugees from floods and fires along the coasts. Social services began to crumble. By the late ’40s, cities found themselves unable to support the additional population, and federal action was called for.

4. Water management – While the resurgence in rural living during the ’20s and ’30s (see below) had done much to reduce the water strain on individual cities, regional disparities increased as water tables over the west dropped, and those in the east grew. In April of 2043, the $220B Roanoke-Little Rock transregional aqueduct finally opened, proving the viability of large scale transport projects. Despite Belcorps’s assurance that four similar projects were shovel ready, the US Regional Water Authorities looked to the President for authorization to proceed. The Supreme Court ruling in Kingston v. Oklahoma in June of 2044 overturned Kelo, and required state and local governments to demonstrate critical local need before appropriating land. The Hay Bale demonstrations – pitting farmers against construction crews – had convinced some members of Congress that aqueduct off-flow channels ought to be considered for those areas through which it passed. With another record drought predicted for the Summer of 2050, consensus throughout Washington and in state capitals across the country was that better solutions were needed.

5. Rural revitalization – After experiencing a virtual depopulation in the latter half of the 20th Century and early years of the 21st, rural America began to experience a rebirth in the early 2020s. Initially driven by the economic meltdown in the last years of the century’s first decade, and business’s efforts to cut costs, telecommuting workers found lower costs and a better quality of life further away from the cities. Once the private energy markets were established and functioning in the late ’20s and early ’30s, and personal renewable energy production became not only viable but potentially profitable, large numbers of Americans undertook what became known colloquially as the “return to the farm”. By the mid-2040s however, it became increasingly clear that there was insufficient infrastructure, either physical or services, to handle the increasing population. Fearing another more virulent outbreak of malaria with the coming summer heat, local and federal authorities declared their intention to come together in February of 2050 to draw up a blueprint for the new ruralism.

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In the last two weeks, although almost assuredly having nothing whatsoever to do with the inauguration of an outspoken sustainability-leaning American president, there has been a raft of new and dire warnings about the state of the climate.  These pronouncements have made liberal use of terms like drastic, catastrophic, catastrophe, radical, severe consequences, imperative, must, can’t afford, most serious threat, dire, and on and on.  And, as any good PR person knows, these terms – whether reflective of the truth or not – are designed to do only one thing: influence the political process, either directly or through constituent pressure.

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In the US, as elsewhere in the world, the climate change debate has been defined by two extremes. On one end are the apocalyptic oracles; on the other, the denying pollyannas. As in most modern debates, the war for attention and persuasion has been waged across the media. In this effort, far and away, the apocalyptic oracles have been the most successful. The denying pollyannas have their say, and while they’ve never managed to match the influence of the other side, the current economic situation will ensure they’re heard more frequently than before.

The great challenge for governments and companies is the same when it comes to climate change: What is true, what does it mean, and how best to proceed? Neither side offers much help here.

It is possible to believe that the science is right, that anthropogenic warming is causing change, and that this change will be harmful to ecosystems, to humans, to life as we know it. It is also possible to believe – at the same time – that economic growth and its ability to improve the lives of vast numbers of people is critical, that human ingenuity and our ability to adapt quickly is a hallmark of our species, that self-interest is more than an historical idée fixe. In fact, we think that holding these two beliefs simultaneously offers the developed and developing worlds the only clear framework for addressing climate change.

The world is not coming to an end. It is changing. Nations and companies have an obligation – one born both of self-interest and community – to mitigate the rate of that change. Too much change, too fast, destroys those systems and processes that sustain, enrich, and encourage our lives. Lowland flooding, projected at a 2° C rise in climate temperatures, has effects – particularly in a global economy – well beyond the immediate.

Nations, companies, and individuals have a tendency – not constructed in response to some grand strategy, but as a characteristic of who we are – for adaptation. Adversary creates solutions. Whether it’s a barter market after Hurricane Katrina, a Jewish-run education system in Auschwitz, or something as comparatively banal-seeming as retraining or retrenching after an economic downturn, we adapt. To ignore this, as much of the debate on appropriate responses to climate change has, is to neglect a significant variable – one that is at the heart of who we are.

Adaptation and mitigation, to a greater or lesser extent, are frequently cited or discussed in serious engagements with climate change. Less frequently mentioned is the role of self-interest. It is here that we think most current climate change debate falters.

Climate change is a global issue, yet nations, companies, and individuals live their lives promoting interests that are concerned with the immediate and local. Rare indeed is the entirely altruistic act; what comes first is what matters most…and with a timescale that reaches well into mid-century, climate change isn’t it – despite the protestations of the apocalyptic oracles or the ‘green’ commitments of most companies.

Nations have interests that do – purely and simply – conflict with those of current and projected climate change agreements. This remains true whether the nation signs-on to such agreements and then either fails to meet the requirements or ignores them (both are happening now with Kyoto), or fails to join, thereby diminishing the effectiveness and even efficacy of such agreements (US at Kyoto). An 80% decrease in CO2 emissions against a 1990 baseline means very little when weighed against bringing a billion people out of poverty.

With little outside of tax incentives or anemic offset markets to promote action in line with climate change policy, companies – and the global economic system in which they are embedded – see little to benefit them. The situation is compounded, exponentially, with the competitive disequilibrium that is created when oversight varies dramatically country to country, region to region. Again, this is less a legalistic problem than one of nature. Companies based in countries committed to growth over much else will be more able to ignore international agreements with near impunity.

Individuals may have self-interested reasons to act aggressively to combat climate change. Or not. Citizens of the Maldives are very motivated; those of the American Midwest less so. Rising sea levels threaten the continued existence of a country in the first instance but may provide longer and more productive growing cycles coming from shifting weather patterns in the second. The real power, in any case, of individuals is limited in affecting climate change. Yet, the basics of food, shelter, energy, and protection remain central to individuals’ conception of self-interest, and there is little wiggle room available to companies, markets, and nations in ignoring them.

Nations can thrive, companies can prosper, and humanity can grow – all sustainably. Yet the paths that the two sides of the current debate would have us take to reach this goal are dead ends. As the world prepares to engage with discussions around Kyoto 2, as the US contemplates serious climate change legislation and the monetization of carbon, and as markets seek to find a way out of their current doldrums, a middle road is available. Finding a way down it will require leadership, nuanced and serious policy, and realism.