When is mitigation part of adaptation?

One I can think of is if you are in business.

I live and work in the United States. If you are reading this you are no doubt already aware of how climate change/global warming is actually a significant  political issue in my country. It is a source of sturm und drang* in our media and in the rhetoric of some politicians. It has gotten so weird that some of the folks in our Congress want to deny funds to adaptation measures simply because it would, in their view, lend credibility to the "C word".

At the same time, the scientific community, and most of the rest of the planet sees it as a health/safety/economic/environmental/etc. issue, accepting the science yadda yadda....
This dicotomy is fascinating in its own right, and is a subject of study by psychologists, anthropologists and others. But there is also a strange warp in the fabric of business in my country related to this.
Whenever I am asked the question, "Do you think ______ is good for business?" I reply "Which one(s)?" Business is not a monolithic structure. It comes in many shapes, sizes and interests, only united by the common denominator that each wants to increase its profits.
On the climate change "issue", different businesses break in different directions. Resource extraction  types and coal heavy utilites tend to fund and florish the whole "denial thing", though not all do. New tech,infotech and big retail tend to break in the other direction.
I think the fact remains that just as in so many other areas, the take by a business (if they have any at all...) can be predicted and analysized by the old adage, "follow the money." It also depends on the business's culture to an extent, exspecially in the higher levels.
Wal-Mart is a good example. It is an aggressive company that tends to be proactive. They also have one of the steepest climate change adaptation slopes of any company. So they are building it into their business model and pushing adaptation and mitigation down the supply chain to try to exist through the storm. But innovation and R&D usually increases cost on the front end.
On the opposite end of the scale is for example, Koch Industries. It is a an old school extractive industries conglomerate. It is also privately held company, with the family having an apparent emotional nostalgia for the America of the late 1800's. They are perhaps the biggest funders of the peculiarly American climate change political fight. That fits the mold of their holdings, in a neo-classical economics sense also.

So, in the U.S.A., when should CC mitigation essentially be part of a business's "adaptation" strategy? I am asking in the traditional neo-classical economics view...Well, when your customer thinks it is important.

From a business view point, mitigation is actually part of adaptation. It is adapting to (depending on sector and location(s)):

• If your customer wants you to pay attention
• You face governmental regulation
• You have supply chain risk issues

As far as "adaptation" as the term is normally used, every business has a need to do adaptation planning for risk avoidance reasons, etc. at differing need and rate depending upon business type, location and a host of other factors. This means that any business in the U.S. should have a climate change strategy at least as far as adaptation ("adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities." ).
But taking mitigation actions in your operations should be planned if:

• You are selling to Wal-Mart or someone in their supply chain
• You are selling to anyone of the top thousand or so of the companies involved in the Carbon Disclosure Project
• You do business in states that comprise the West Coast of the U.S. (Due to regulation frameworks if no other reason)
• You do business internationally in non-extractive industries/business types

*"Sturm und Drang...literally "Storm and Urge",  is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment." Wikipedia.