Good question David. The choice we really made in the title was whether to call it simply '
Permaculture and climate change', or to add adaptation. This was essentially a branding decision: the main target audience of the book is those involved in devising and implementing climate policy, among whom knowledge and understand of
permaculture is quite rare, but where there's a lot of interest in different approaches. Adaptation is currently a higher profile and more dynamic field in that area of work, so including it in the title will hopefully mean more people pick it up and act by changing policy, legal and financial structures etc. in ways that help bring some of these approaches in from the margins.
Between us and the rest of the permies.com community, what we are really trying to do is open people up to more holistic ways of understanding and acting that illuminate the connections and interdependencies among the different strategies we cover. This challenges the distinction between mitigation and adaptation, as permaculture/based adaptation measures are, of course, also low
carbon.
In terms of policy measures, we've mostly set out a series of suggestions for more dialogue between policy and some of the strategic initiatives that are starting to emerge, like the Next Big Step
project (
https://international.permaculture.org.uk/) and ECOLISE, a European network of community-based
sustainability organisation (www.ecolise.eu). The Climate Change Statement and Action Plan isn't our own, it's one agreed at the International Permaculture Convergence in London last September as an outcome of Next Big Step. It has its own website where you can read it in full, at www.permacultureclimatechange.org