Where does mitigation collide?

In the law of damages, mitigation is the injured party's obligation to take reasonable steps to limit the loss flowing from a breach or a wrong, so that a claimant cannot recover for losses that reasonable action would have avoided. The principle was stated authoritatively by Viscount Haldane in British Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co Ltd v Underground Electric Railways Co of London Ltd (1912), which held that a plaintiff must take all reasonable steps to reduce the loss and may not claim for any part of it that a failure to act allowed to grow. The doctrine was later systematised in Anglo-American writing, for example in McCormick's 1935 Handbook on the Law of Damages. The referent is a claimant's legal duty judged against a standard of reasonableness, not the softening of a spoken request or the reduction of greenhouse gases.[1][2]

Unit

One claimant's duty to limit avoidable loss after a breach or wrong

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by courts against the reasonable steps the claimant could have taken to reduce the loss

In pragmatics, mitigation is the softening of the force of a speech act to reduce its capacity to offend or impose, for example hedging a request, a criticism, or a refusal so that it lands more gently. Fraser's 1980 Conversational mitigation defined it as a speaker's deliberate reduction of the unwelcome effects an utterance may have on a hearer, and treated it as a strategic choice rather than plain courtesy. Brown and Levinson's 1987 Politeness placed the softening of face-threatening acts within a broader theory of politeness. The referent is a linguistic move that weakens the impact of what is said, not a legal duty to limit loss or a policy to reduce greenhouse gases.[3][4]

Unit

One softening move applied to an utterance or speech act

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through discourse analysis of hedges, qualifiers, and indirect phrasing in recorded talk

In climate policy and science, mitigation is human action to reduce the sources of greenhouse gases or to strengthen the sinks that remove them from the atmosphere, and it is set against adaptation, which instead adjusts to the warming that occurs. Schneider's 1989 The Greenhouse Effect: Science and Policy reviewed the warming problem and the responses to it, including cutting emissions at their source. The distinction was later codified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose Working Group III report Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change made mitigation the standard name for the emissions-and-sinks side of climate response. The referent is an intervention in the global carbon budget, not a softened utterance or a claimant's duty to limit loss.[5][6]

Unit

One action that lowers greenhouse gas emissions or raises removals

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified as tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent avoided or removed per year