Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding caused by climate change are already impacting people and nature significantly across the world. 2022 alone saw a summer of record-breaking temperatures in India, Europe and the United States, drought in China, and catastrophic floods in Pakistan. The world is slowly waking up to the effects of climate change, yet this is just the beginning of the impacts scientists expect to see. Even if greenhouse gases were to stop being emitted tomorrow, some parts of the world will still become uninhabitable, some livelihoods untenable, food shortages will spread and international conflicts will emerge. And if emissions continue to rise, these changes – and worse – become inevitable.

In Sink or Swim, Susannah Fisher explores how the world needs to adapt to climate change, and offers an introduction to the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community.
Action to adapt to climate change until now has been incremental. Governments, financial institutions and local groups have tinkered around the edges of current systems, trying to cope with changing seasons and worsening floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts without making major changes to how we live our lives. In many cases this will not be enough. Some programmes to adapt to climate change have not worked, and some have made things worse. The tools the international community uses to pay for adaptation and the way governments have tried to adapt to climate change have fundamental flaws and cannot address the major challenges ahead. Many people and places are reaching the limits of this incremental adaptation. Communities in New Orleans, Miami and Mumbai now experience regular flooding, destroying roads and filling their homes with filthy water. Street -food sellers in Vietnam, farm workers in Australia and builders in Qatar are out all day in the burning sun. Eventually the extreme heat will make working outside just too dangerous for human health.

We need to make hard choices about how to adapt to climate change now. They go beyond tweaking the current system; we need significant changes in the way people earn their livings, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and in how the international community accommodates the movement of people within and across borders. Should people be encouraged to move away from the coast to avoid flooding and storms? How can global food supplies be managed when many parts of the world may be hit by simultaneous droughts, destroying crops and upsetting trade? How can resources be shared, and how can conflict be managed when there isn't enough water? These are ultimately choices about what societies value, what communities want to prioritise with limited resources, and what dreams people have for their future and their children's future.

The world is not facing up to these choices. They require new approaches, challenging current systems and coming up with new ones, with this particularly difficult with our short-term political and economic cycles. Agreeing what society wishes to protect will require engagement with diverse communities, a willingness to go against powerful interests, and working with uncertainty about what the future holds.

This book draws on cutting edge research, interviews with experts, practical examples from across the world and the personal experiences of Susannah Fisher to tell the story of the tough choices on adaptation that affect everyday life, the survival of communities, and relationships between countries. It explores how our systems support or inhibit these choices, what they will mean for people around the world, and ways we can still have a liveable planet in the 21st century and beyond. Will we choose to sink or swim? This book asks the questions that will lead to an ultimate answer.