Nobody wants to make their situation tougher. With climate change, business as usual can do just that. Let’s say your company needs to keep a large volume of inventory cold. Maybe gourmet ice cream. Climate change is already making temperature control a lot harder; heatwaves are more widespread and frequent, and you’re feeling the heat in your Atlanta warehouse.

If you respond by simply waiting until your bigger electricity bills arrive— because to keep inventory cool in heatwaves, your refrigeration and A/C equipment increase output and thus input—you inadvertently feed the heatwaves you’re trying to resist. GHG emissions go up with higher use of conventional grid energy, increasing the likelyhood and intensity of heatwaves, proverbially shooting yourself in the foot. If instead you invest in a “double-dip” climate adaptation project—formulated to boost climate risk resilience while also lowering energy inputs— you can avoid  higher energy bills, and shift remaining energy demand to renewables that don’t emit GHG. That’s far less self-defeating.

“Double-dip” climate adaptation projects—those that advance climate adaptation and carbon mitigation with the same project— are not only possible, the consensus of the field is that they are superior (WEF, BCG, WRI). Here double-dipping is not a faux pas, it’s a la mode. Your gourmet ice cream company double-dip project for climate resilience could be shifting to operating in well-insulated warehouses combined with running modern, high-efficiency heat pumps and freezers powered in the day by solar, since the sun’s energy would be ample during peak heatwaves. Feed your customers, not climate change.