Environmental Behavioral Sciences Seminar with Eugene Richardson

Climate Change and Counteradaptation

Mainstream climate research and policy often treat adaptation as a neutral, technical process, favoring top-down "adjustment" approaches. This seminar argues that these paradigms obscure how vulnerability in the Global South is actively produced by colonial dispossession, racial capitalism, and illicit financial flows—ultimately pushing communities to adjust to unjust structures rather than transform them. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, where counteradaptation describes traits that evolve in antagonistic response to another organism's adaptations or behavior, this seminar proposes counteradaptation as a critical analytic lens. This framework reveals that communities are largely adapting not to geophysical forces, but to colonial legacies and the social structures that sustain them. Ultimately, reframing climate response as counteradaptation shifts the focus from passive resilience toward the necessity of reparative transformation.

Bio: Eugene Richardson, MD, PhD, is a physician-anthropologist in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he directs the Paul Farmer Planetary Health Lab. His research examines vulnerability to epidemics and climate change, and from that work he has developed a new theory of counteradaptation, which he will present at this seminar.