Adapt or Die?

This paper investigates the moral significance of identity-related risks in climate change adaptation. It will engage with Laura García-Portela’s discussion of non-economic loss and damage in Rectifying Climate Injustice to identify non-economic losses that can accompany efforts to maintain or transform ways of life. Based on a distinction between adaptation aiming at mere survival and resilient adaptation that maintains essential functions and identities, criteria for identifying some risks to identity as intolerable moral risks are suggested (loss of core agential capacities, general impairment of the capacity to value objectives and to maintain a coherent normative outlook). The identification of intolerable moral risks underlines the gravity of non-economic losses and the moral obligation to provide adequate reparation. Finally, the implications for adequate responses to the entailed loss and damage through symbolic reparation, political repair, and active transformation are discussed.