Climate change adaptation guidance: Clarifying three modes of planning and implementation

Abstract

As the world recognises the need to adapt to unavoidable climate change, diverse adaptation planning and risk assessment guides have emerged, with the legitimate intent of providing context- or sector-specific guidance. Despite this, adaptation seems challenged to move to action, and users of guides often report being overwhelmed or confused. New guides seem to continually re-invent the details of the adaptation cycle of planning and implementation, whereas it may be better to focus more on making these details salient to users at different stages of their adaptation journey, in terms of levels of experience or organisational process. We review 39 guides to identify leading practice around a basic set of six core steps in an adaptation cycle, which could be the starting point for any new guide. We then argue that it should be standard to provide guidance about different modes of applying an adaptation cycle in practice, which can help practitioners with different types of use and as they evolve their understanding of their adaptation needs. We show how defining three archetypal modes of adaptation cycle – Scan, Portfolio and Project – helps to sharpen the advice about the approaches to apply in each of the steps within each mode, and particularly to simplify the journey to action for practitioners considering climate adaptation for the first time. We discuss what response users have had to some applications of this approach. We conclude that it is time for adaptation researchers and practitioners to move on from putting energy into re-inventing the adaptation cycle, and instead provide more differentiated guidance for how the cycle can be applied as the user’s context changes through their adaptation journey. Show more