 Adaptation is one of the responses to the problem of human induced climate change which is to do with how do we cope with the inevitable and unstoppable impacts of climate change that are beginning to happen already and will happen for the next 10 or 20 years even if we do reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. So this is to do with preventing or managing floods, building embankments in the coastal areas against sea level rise, ensuring water and drought prone areas. We are seeing more and more droughts, floods and cyclones and hurricanes around the world and we have to deal with these. So adaptation to climate change is dealing with the impacts of climatic events like those. Well most of the people on planet Earth are poor living in poor countries in Africa, Asia and other developing countries and they have the least ability to deal with the impacts of climate change and they happen to also be living in some of the parts of the world which are going to be most vulnerable. And so for several billion people living on planet Earth who are going to be affected by impacts of climate change and whose own greenhouse emissions are miniscule compared to rich people, it's the most important part of the climate change problem is how are they going to deal with those impacts and for the rest of us how are we going to help them deal with those impacts. So in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in working group two which is on impacts vulnerability and adaptation, there are four chapters on adaptation. The first of the four is chapter 14 which I was a coordinating lead author of, it's on the impacts and opportunities of adaptation, it's about adaptation planning. The chapter after that chapter 15 looks at implementing adaptation and the chapter after that chapter 16 looks at the barriers and limits to adaptation and the fourth of the set of four chapter 17 looks at economics. So my chapter looks at how do we plan for adaptation and I said this is an issue that we're going to have to deal with whether we like it or not and we have to start thinking about it both in developed countries as well as in developing in poor countries. So the main highlights of the chapter are that countries are now realizing that they have to do adaptation planning, many of the countries have done plans and we've cited a few of them. I'll mention the one from my country Bangladesh where we have a very significant large scale Bangladesh climate change adaptation strategy in which the government of Bangladesh is putting substantial amounts of money themselves and we're also receiving funds from the global community and there are hundreds of activities taking place within government, outside government, many of them in the coastal areas which are the most prone to the impacts of climate change, salinity, intrusion at the moment, cyclones periodically, floods periodically. So a lot of disaster reduction, disaster warnings being put in place, that kind of thing is needed in many different countries. We have two major strategies to deal with the impacts of climate change. Firstly, mitigation. Mitigation is about reducing our emissions so that we prevent climatic changes from happening. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to prevent some level of climatic change. We can still prevent some very catastrophic levels of climate change in the long run. So there's a time scale associated with the impacts of mitigation. So if we do mitigation now, we won't see the benefits of it for decades to come because of the lag in the atmosphere. On the other hand, in the short term, there's nothing else we can do except adapt because the short term impacts are already locked in. So it's a combination of adaptation and mitigation, not an either or. We need to do both. Mitigation to prevent catastrophic climatic impacts in the long run, at global scale, adaptation to prevent and deal with the inevitable impacts in the shorter term, mainly in poorer countries and in poorer communities. Private sector has a huge part to play primarily in mitigation because it's to do with the investments in what kind of future energy structures are we going to have. If it's more of the same depending on fossil fuels and investing in more fossil fuels, then we are doomed. We're going to cross four and a half degrees very easily if we continue business as usual. On the other hand, if the investment community changes the direction of investments, and we're talking trillions of dollars of investment into renewable and sustainable energy pathways, then we can actually prevent the catastrophic end of the problem from occurring. There'll be some impacts of climate change, but they won't be as bad as they might be if we continue to do what we're doing. So that's the primary role of business. There are also things that business can do in the adaptation arena, primarily to do with insurance. The insurance companies now are realizing that they may be a huge loser if we don't take actions to deal with climate change. And so insurance is a very good tool to pay premiums so that we ensure any loss and damage that might occur by paying the premiums now and we can get some compensation for when the losses actually occur in the future. My center in Bangladesh runs, it's based at a university and we run a master's program in climate change and development. We also do a lot of work at grass root level on community based adaptation with vulnerable communities. And we host and organize an annual international conference. It so happens that this year's conference will be in April this year here in Nairobi and Kenya. It's a seven day long event where people come from all over the world and several hundred of them. They spend three days in groups staying with vulnerable communities and then come back to the capital and spend another four days in conference and sharing. Next year the event will be in Bangladesh. So anybody who's interested in the most vulnerable and how they are coping and adapting, because they're not sitting idle, they are actually taking actions, are most welcome to find out more about it. It's called the Community Based Adaptation Conference. The website is www.cba9.org.