COP-30 is underway, dominating the news with images of delegations, roundtables, and speeches that, for a few days, are pushing climate change to the center of the global public agenda. As always, there is an expectation that, this time, the ambitious commitments will translate into something more concrete: robust action plans, with adequate funding and real implementation capacity. These meetings are important—they create political pressure, mobilize resources, and signal intentions. But it's curious how, even with all this global formality, we continue to discuss climate change on an overly abstract level, far removed from the materiality of the decisions. We talk about the planet when we should also talk about the landscape; we discuss the climate system when we should discuss the territory, where people live, work, produce, and concretely face the effects of these transformations.
It was with this unease in mind that I watched Silvio Crestana's recent presentation on Siagro 2025Crestana is a physicist by training and one of the most unique names in Embrapa's history. Although widely known, his trajectory deserves to be remembered. He joined the company at a time when it was still thought that agricultural research was the exclusive domain of agronomists, biologists, or veterinarians. A physicist there seemed improbable—and, precisely for that reason, necessary and innovative. With a pioneering spirit, he led research on technologies long before they became commonplace, headed Embrapa Agricultural Instrumentation, located in São Carlos, next to the USP and UFSCar campuses, presided over Embrapa between January 2005 and July 2009, and in all these roles, cultivated a rare trait: in addition to competence and professionalism, education, sobriety, openness to dialogue, and the ability to build consensus without renouncing principles. He is someone with whom one can disagree without dividing.
His presentation, which inspires this column, has a central merit: it brings the climate discussion back to the ground of reality, to the territory, to applied science. Instead of paralyzing alarmism, Crestana starts from the evidence—historical series, empirical trends, models, projections—to recall an old lesson, which Darwin intuited on the margins of Beagle And that echoes today in the restless edges of our cities, farmlands, and forests that still resist: it is not the strongest who will survive, but those capable of converting intelligence into adaptation in the face of a world that has already changed—and that will continue to change, even if all our efforts to contain global warming are successful.
When everything becomes climate change, nothing can be explained.
The starting point of the presentation is a critique of the “universal narrative” that uses climate change as an automatic explanation for everything, or almost everything. Hurricanes? Climate change. Drought? Climate change. Too much rain? Climate change. Too little rain? Also. Pandemic? Climate change. This indiscriminate use of the term produces fatigue, disinterest and, paradoxically, a certain comfort: if everything is climate change, nothing requires human responsibility.
Fear can mobilize people—for a while. Then it gets tiring. Science, however, doesn't work with slogans: it works with... data, scale, probabilities, risk, territoryAnd when we return to the evidence, the climate discussion ceases to be prophecy and becomes a concrete problem again. Crestana shows, for example, temperature series in São Carlos: less periodicity, more variability, more asymmetry, increasing amplitude. It's not narrative—it's measurement. And what these data reveal is that the challenge is not only warming, but volatility, climate disorder, unpredictability.
For agriculture, this is devastating. Not only because the climate is changing, but because it is changing erratically, in a disorganized way, difficult to anticipate. And risk that cannot be anticipated becomes a loss — economic, environmental, social.
The adaptation is local — and the university hasn't realized that yet.
Another essential point in Crestana's presentation is the idea that adaptation, necessary for survival—it's worth emphasizing—is not achieved through global agreements: it happens on the ground. It is there that risks are measured, solutions are designed, and vulnerability is materialized. Agroclimatic zones, micro-basins, management, irrigation, water infrastructure—all of this exists on scales that the COP, however good it may be, cannot address.
The problem the physicist points out, avoiding the alarmism that is impossible to hide, is that we are not prepared to promote adaptation. Worse still: we are not even preparing ourselves. Adaptation requires capabilities that cannot be built overnight—a fine reading of climate risk, integrated systems analysis, strategic use of technologies, territorial management, local governance, and, above all, professionals capable of articulating these elements into concrete solutions. But the system for training professionals that we would need to face this new world simply does not exist. We talk more and more about multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary science—and all the other prefixes—but institutional practice follows another path, fragmented, rigid, organized by boundaries that the climate does not recognize.
Undergraduate and graduate programs remain structured with rigid curricula, watertight departments, and disciplinary boundaries that offer little interaction. Training continues to be geared towards deepening specializations, not integrating them. Academic competitions reproduce this logic: they seek "the specialist in X," rarely someone capable of articulating X, Y, and Z in concrete problems. The scientific career, in turn, reinforces this same pattern. Journals remain predominantly specialized, organized by disciplinary fiefdoms, and evaluation criteria reward vertical depth and penalize horizontal syntheses—precisely the type of knowledge upon which adaptation depends.
Thus, we train highly qualified professionals for a world that no longer exists, while the real world—complex, hybrid, undisciplined—demands skills that the academic system is not structured to deliver. It is in this context that the figure proposed by Crestana—this engineer of adaptation—becomes almost mythological: a professional capable of navigating between physics, soil science, ecology, hydrology, economics, modeling, engineering, data science, and rural sociology. A hybrid. Not improbable due to a lack of human talent, but due to a lack of institutions prepared to train them. And it is precisely in the face of this structural inability to train the professional we need that Crestana's proposal gains strength—and urgency.
The major phenomena that traditionally organized part of the climate's variability—such as the alternations of El Niño and La Niña, responsible for drier or wetter years, and other events that influence atmospheric circulation—continue to operate, but no longer produce the same regularity as decades ago. Their effect appears mixed with more intense heat waves, rainfall concentrated in a few days, prolonged droughts, and extreme events that arise without a defined pattern. What once obeyed certain cycles now appears more irregular, more asymmetrical, more difficult to anticipate—and, above all, indifferent to the disciplinary boundaries with which we insist on organizing knowledge. The fact is that climate risk does not follow university organizational charts. Insisting on rigid structures to address fluid problems is, at the very least, naive; at most, irresponsible. Adaptation is, by definition, interdisciplinary. The university, by tradition, is not.
The “Science and Engineering of Adaptation”: a proposal to be taken seriously.
Crestana proposes an idea that deserves attention: the creation of a Science and Engineering of Adaptation. A field capable of dealing with the growing complexity of agricultural and environmental systems, integrating advanced technology, ecological knowledge, and a keen understanding of risk. He insists on what seems obvious: it is not enough to produce data, it is necessary to interpret it; it is not enough to model risks, it is necessary to create solutions; it is not enough to adopt technology, it is necessary to make it accessible to local realities.
This engineering of adaptation is also an engineering of humility. It requires recognizing limits, listening to territories, engaging in dialogue with farmers, public managers, researchers, engineers, and local leaders. It requires science—and it requires humanism. Perhaps that is why its proposal sounds both ambitious and necessary: it understands that resilience is not only technical, but also social, cultural, and political.
COP-30 will run its course — necessary, symbolic, global. But the true test of our future is not in the conference halls. It lies in the landscapes where life happens: on rural properties, in vulnerable municipalities, in the corridors of universities that still insist on dividing what the real world demands be united.
Crestana's message is clear: the climate crisis will not be overcome with speeches, but with adaptation. And adaptation cannot be improvised: it must be built. Perhaps this is the true meaning of resilience—not resisting a changing world, but finding intelligent, humane, and localized ways to change with it.
And São Paulo, home to some of the country's best universities, major research institutes, and established technology hubs, brings together a rare combination of talent and infrastructure—and is therefore especially well-positioned to lead the training of the professionals that adaptation will require, not in the future, but now.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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