Colloff, MatthewMartin-Lopez, BertaLavorel, SLocatelli, BrunoGorddard, RussellLongaretti, Pierre-YvesWalters, Gretchenvan Kerkhoff, LorraeWyborn, CarinaCoreau, AudreyWise, Russell M.Dunlop, MichaelDegeorges, PatrickDoherty, Michael2021-05-072021-05-071462-9011http://hdl.handle.net/1885/232515Transformative adaptation will be increasingly important to effectively address the impacts of climate change and other global drivers on social-ecological systems. Enabling transformative adaptation requires new ways to evaluate and adaptively manage trade-offs between maintaining desirable aspects of current social-ecological systems and adapting to major biophysical changes to those systems. We outline such an approach, based on three elements developed by the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA): (1) the benefits of adaptation services; that sub-set of ecosystem services that help people adapt to environmental change; (2) The values-rules-knowledge perspective (vrk) for identifying those aspects of societal decision-making contexts that enable or constrain adaptation and (3) the adaptation pathways approach for implementing adaptation, that builds on and integrates adaptation services and the vrk perspective. Together, these elements provide a future-oriented approach to evaluation and use of ecosystem services, a dynamic, grounded understanding of governance and decision-making and a logical, sequential approach that connects decisions over time. The TARA approach represents a means for achieving changes in institutions and governance needed to support transformative adaptationThe research was supported by CSIRO Land and Water. We thank the Embassy of France in Australia and the Australian Academy of Sciences for funding the first Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance workshop in Canberra, October 27-31, 2014. We thank Craig Beatty, Mirjam Kuzee (IUCN) and Alistair Hobday (CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere) for reviewing the manuscript and providing constructive comments. The funding partners that have supported this research include the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) with financial support from the CGIAR Fundapplication/pdfen-AU© 2016 The Authorshttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Global changeTransformationAdaptive governanceValues-rules-knowledgeAdaptation pathwaysAdaptation servicesDecsion makingLearningCo-productionPower relationsAgency201710.1016/j.envsci.2016.11.0072020-11-23Creative Commons Attribution licence