As Climate Week NYC brings together leaders, advocates, businesses, scientists, and policymakers from around the world, one question deserves more attention:
Who actually gets to adapt to climate change?
That question did not begin as the subject of a single book for me. It emerged across three books, each addressing a different stage of the climate challenge. Together, they form a trilogy about education, adaptation, and justice—and about what happens when we move from understanding climate change to living with its consequences.
Book One: Learning
Climate Change in the Classroom begins with young people.
Climate change will shape the lives of today’s students long after today’s political debates have disappeared. Climate education therefore cannot stop with explaining greenhouse gases, melting glaciers, or rising temperatures. Students also need to understand adaptation, disaster preparedness, environmental justice, community resilience, and their own capacity to participate in solutions.
The first book asks:
How do we prepare a generation for the climate future it is inheriting?
Education is where the trilogy begins—but education alone cannot protect a neighborhood from a flood, cool an overheated apartment, rebuild a community after a disaster, or determine where billions of adaptation dollars are spent.
That leads to the second book.
Book Two: Adapting
The Climate Adaptation Generation: A Blueprint for the Future moves from learning about climate change to living with it.
A new generation is emerging—not defined simply by age, but by circumstance. It includes young people, older adults, planners, teachers, workers, community advocates, and ordinary residents who increasingly must make decisions in a climate-altered world.
They are the Adaptation Generation.
The book examines practical ways communities can prepare, adapt, and flourish rather than simply endure one disaster after another.
Its central question is:
How can we build communities capable of adapting to what is coming?
But while writing about adaptation, another problem became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Adaptation is not distributed equally.
Some communities can purchase protection. Others cannot. Some have professional grant writers, engineers, consultants, political connections, insurance, and access to capital. Others confront the same climate threats with aging infrastructure, limited municipal budgets, insecure housing, and little influence over the decisions determining their futures.
That realization produced the third book.
Book Three: Justice
Who Gets to Adapt? Environmental Elites, Blue-Collar Communities and the Climate Divide asks the question that completes the trilogy:
Who gets protected—and who gets left behind?
Climate change is creating more than environmental risk. It is exposing an adaptation divide.
Wealthier households can elevate homes, relocate, insure property, install backup power, obtain air conditioning, and recover more quickly after disasters. Wealthier jurisdictions can hire specialists and compete successfully for complicated state and federal programs.
Meanwhile, blue-collar, rural, working-class, and frontline communities may face greater exposure while possessing fewer resources with which to respond.
This creates an uncomfortable possibility: climate adaptation itself can reproduce inequality.
A seawall protects one neighborhood. A resilience investment raises property values and displaces longtime residents in another. A grant program technically open to everyone disproportionately rewards communities with the staff and expertise necessary to navigate it.
The question is no longer simply whether society will adapt.
It is who gets to adapt first, who gets to decide, and who pays the price when protection is unequal.
One Trilogy, One Arc
Taken together, the three books tell a single story:
Learn. Adapt. Question who benefits.
Climate Change in the Classroom asks how we prepare people.
The Climate Adaptation Generation asks how we prepare communities.
Who Gets to Adapt? asks whether the systems doing the preparing are fair.
That progression—from education to adaptation to climate justice—is what makes this trilogy especially relevant during Climate Week NYC.
Climate Week understandably celebrates innovation, investment, technology, commitments, and ambitious plans.
But adaptation ultimately happens somewhere much less glamorous.
It happens in homes.
Schools.
Neighborhoods.
Planning departments.
Workplaces.
Farms.
Floodplains.
And around kitchen tables where families decide whether they can afford to rebuild, relocate, insure their homes, or simply stay where they are.
The success of climate adaptation should therefore not be measured only by dollars invested or projects completed.
It should also be measured by who becomes safer.
Climate Week Is a Good Time to Ask a Harder Question
The next stage of the climate conversation cannot be only about whether governments and institutions are taking action.
We must also ask:
Whose lives improve because of that action?
A society can spend billions on climate adaptation and still deepen the climate divide.
Or it can use adaptation as an opportunity to build something better: communities that are safer, healthier, more democratic, more economically secure, and better prepared for the disruptions ahead.
That is the journey of these three books.
From the classroom.
To the community.
To the structures of power determining who receives protection.
And ultimately to the question at the center of the trilogy:
In a changing climate, who gets to adapt?
Climate Week Goodreads Giveaways
To coincide with the Climate Week conversation, I am also using two Goodreads Giveaways to introduce more readers to the ideas behind the trilogy.
The giveaways are an invitation to go beyond the headlines surrounding climate change and explore the human questions underneath them: how we educate, how we adapt, how we distribute protection, and how we prevent climate adaptation from becoming another privilege available primarily to those who can afford it.
Climate Week lasts only a few days.