When Bill Gates published his latest essay on climate change, the response was immediate. Many critics accused him of defeatism or saw the memo as another example of billionaires bending a knee to the climate denialism of President Donald Trump. (Trump himself was a fan.) Others told him to stop opining about climate change. “Respectfully, Bill Gates Should Shut Up,” read a headline by the online magazine Slate.

In his memo, the billionaire who once urged the world to “innovate our way out of a climate disaster” now seemed to be lowering the bar—arguing that global warming, while devastating, “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” and that the world’s climate-change strategy should focus on human welfare over temperature or emissions goals. That message struck a nerve in a movement that has fought for decades against the oil and gas industry’s multimillion-dollar campaign to fund climate denial and delay.

Gates released the memo as a message to “everyone at COP30,” the United Nations’ climate conference, which began Monday; one of the gathering’s key goals is to push nations to follow through on their existing emissions commitments. Gates didn’t say they shouldn’t bother, but he did suggest that focusing heavily on near-term emissions reductions may not help—especially for poor countries—as much as other strategies.

Gates would be wrong on that front; for some small island states, which face the imminent threat of being submerged by rising seas, climate change is humanity’s demise. But by dismissing his argument, many critics ended up downplaying a different kind of truth: Making emissions reductions the core climate strategy is not serving many of the people most affected by climate change.

Gates’s message is far from radical. In fact, leaders from the global South have been making a similar case for decades. Even the Association of Small Island States has argued that global climate commitments must prioritize human welfare alongside ambitious emissions reductions, especially from rich countries. Its representatives recognize that net-zero trajectories alone won’t help people survive the next storm or rebuild their home. They also need the resources—primarily the funding—to live through climate disasters and adapt to climate change’s consequences.

In wealthy countries, adaptation is often seen as a technical or an engineering fix: installing air-conditioning, restoring wetlands, building seawalls. In many places, though, climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare. Better health care, for instance, can reduce deaths and disease after floods; diversified agriculture helps rural families withstand droughts. “Adaptation is not only about restoring riparian forests or seeking nature-based solutions; it’s also about adapting investments: exploring new credit lines, rethinking insurance, and declaring emergencies,” Brazil’s minister of the environment and climate change, Marina Silva, said at an event earlier this year. Gates puts it a bit differently: For poor countries, “development is adaptation.”