As the scale of climate change impacts become apparent, organisations globally are seeking to adapt. They face dual imperatives of transformation—going beyond business-as-usual to embrace disruptive changes to their decision-making processes—and mainstreaming—enacting adaptation initiatives with minimal change to existing capabilities and structures. In practice, these important imperatives can conflict, leading to the emergence of multiple tensions in developing and implementing adaptation initiatives, potentially paralysing action or leading to one imperative dominating. We call this the Transformation-Mainstreaming Conundrum (TMC) and suggest that both imperatives can (and must be) pursued simultaneously in practice. This perspective identifies recognisable tensions that can arise when seeking to address both imperatives and suggest steps towards responding to the underlying issues these tensions reveal. The TMC needs to be recognised, and approaches to navigating its tensions must be addressed explicitly in both scholarship and practice, to re-energise the urgency of scaling up adaptation efforts.

Climate change, through extreme weather events and slow onset climatic changes, disrupts the operation of transport networks, and those in low-income countries (LICs) across Africa and South Asia are particularly vulnerable to climate change. This paper explores the barriers that LICs face across Africa and South Asia regarding preparedness of transport infrastructure to climate change, with the intent of addressing the knowledge gaps and consequential needs of LICs to support the delivery of more climate-resilient transport. Literature on climate change adaptation and transport resilience among LICs is reviewed to identify the broad challenges and barriers regarding climate change adaptation. Semi-structured interviews with 13 transport stakeholders across Africa and South Asia were also conducted to understand the challenges specific to the transport sector in the regions. Several barriers were identified, including a lack of data and knowledge on climate change impacts, design and prioritisation of remedial actions, budgeting and planning for climate change, and identifying and engaging with stakeholders. Findings from this paper and the wider research project it comprises inform policy guidance that calls for greater national and international coordination to develop practical, relevant and usable data, tools, advice and support for some of the most at-risk transport networks to climate change in the world.

Existing constraints in current climate risk assessments make them inappropriate to effectively assess the true exposure of society and businesses to climate-related risk. Using the key constraints to guide a conceptual framework, we identify four cross-cutting and inter-related critical paths for improvement.

Information and knowledge resources to support climate action (climate services) have been the subject of investments by European and national funding agencies and by the private sector in response to a growing demand and requirements to support climate-related actions. The extent to which the current state of these resources are consistent with and attributable to these investments still requires further assessment. There have been efforts to continue to inform such investments and to stimulate the climate service market. These to some degree identified remaining and emerging gaps, including those intending to support enhancing the breadth, quality and relevance of products and services, the infrastructure supporting the climate service public and private market domains and the factors enabling market growth. The criticality of realising the benefits from the availability and use of this intelligence is increasing and evolving as Europe and the rest of the world call for a transition to a climate-resilient and a low-carbon society and economy. To realise and sustain this potential, there is the need for a systematic assessment of the impacts of previous investments and of where and what type of investments could enhance the impacts in terms of informing action—exploring and identifying shared pathways to enable the development and use of climate services.

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.

There is widespread recognition of the imperative to mainstream adaptation based on the need for adaptation to be an integral part of decision-making processes. Recognition is growing that climate risks will require transformational adaptation, including new management and decision processes. However, our experience in multiple contexts demonstrated that these imperatives are often profoundly incompatible. Practice and theory suggest that transformational adaptation agendas require many things to be in place before mainstreaming. These 'things’ encompass new types of knowledge and understanding and accounting for plural and dynamic values, and new formal and informal rules related to decisions and choices. These requirements indicate the need for deep social and institutional changes to incorporate transformational adaptation into policy and practice. These create unavoidable tensions and challenges to mainstreaming transformational adaptation, raising the question, “what are we mainstreaming into, the current or a transformed decision system”?To highlight these tensions and their gravity, we label the phenomenon the mainstreaming-transformation paradox . The paradox reveals that transformation is much more complicated than current guidance suggests and needs re-imagined theory and practices. Our attempts at navigating this paradox have primarily used pathways of incremental changes that build towards transformation. More strategies need to be developed and tested, including options that assist rapid and foundational changes. By identifying the paradox and our experiences, we seek to engage others by providing a focus for making sense of past experiences and clarifying associated tensions and challenges, leading to further understanding strategies, theories and practices needed to navigate this paradox.

As the need for climate action increases in terms of timing, nature and scope there is a commensurate call for knowledge and information that can enable such action consistent with policy targets. The European Climate Change Adaptation Conference ECCA2021 virtual session ‘At your Service: Climate knowledge and information as enablers for climate action' engaged users and providers of these enablers to seek views and insights as to how knowledge and information are and could better inform and inspire the required action for climate adaptation, resilience and mitigation. The intention of this engagement was to identify successes and where urgent and priority action is needed to enhance the relevance, quality and use of that knowledge and information. The results of deliberations revealed perceptions of successes and actions needed under the four ECCA2021 themes – sharing knowledge, inspiring action on transformation, creating connections and collaborations, and implementing action. Central to most of the highlighted successes and required action is the need to re-imagine the knowledge and information being provided and how they are used to be consistent with and supportive of the evolving nature and scope of required climate action.

The Climate Science for Service Partnership China (CSSP China) is a joint program between China and the United Kingdom to build the basis for climate services to support the weather and climate resilient economic development and welfare in China. Work Package 5 (WP5) provides the translational science on identification of: different users and providers, and their mandates; factors contributing to communication gaps and capacities between various users and providers; and mechanisms to work through such issues to develop and/or evolve a range of climate services. Key findings to emerge include that users from different sectors have varying capacities, requirements, and needs for information in their decision contexts, with a current strong preference for weather information. Separating climate and weather services when engaging users is often not constructive. Furthermore, there is a need to move to a service delivery model that is more user-driven and science informed; having sound climate science is not enough to develop services that are credible, salient, reliable, or timely for diverse user groups. Greater investment in building the capacity of the research community supporting and providing climate services to conduct translational sciences and develop regular user engagement processes is much needed. Such a move would help support the China Meteorological Administration’s (CMA) ongoing efforts to improve climate services. It would also assist in potentially linking a broader group of “super” users who currently act as providers and purveyors of climate services because they find the existing offerings are not relevant to their needs or cannot access CMA’s services.

Digital technology is having a major impact on many areas of society, and there is equal opportunity for impact on science. This is particularly true in the environmental sciences as we seek to understand the complexities of the natural environment under climate change. This perspective presents the outcomes of a summit in this area, a unique cross-disciplinary gathering bringing together environmental scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, social scientists, and representatives of the creative arts. The key output of this workshop is an agreed vision in the form of a framework and associated roadmap, captured in the Windermere Accord. This accord envisions a new kind of environmental science underpinned by unprecedented amounts of data, with technological advances leading to breakthroughs in taming uncertainty and complexity, and also supporting openness, transparency, and reproducibility in science. The perspective also includes a call to build an international community working in this important area.

Climate services have advanced significantly, evolving from primarily supply-side, top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to a recognition of the need to support a unique and evolving community of decision makers and decision contexts. However, investments in climate services have not kept pace with the increasing need for evidence-based actions, and the need for "trusted relationships" between consumers and producers of those services may actually be slowing progress at a time when there is an increasing need to scale up from individual decisions to system-wide adaptation and resilience. In the meantime, recognition of the linkages between adaptation actions and the broader sustainable development agenda require an expansion of the concept of climate services from its historically narrow focus on the use of climate science for impact assessments and adaptation to that required to deliver a broader set of societal benefits based on increasing capacity to manage climate and other risks. A "next generation approach" is justified by the complexity and inter-relatedness of climate issues, the broad range of societal challenges, the scope of required actions, the rate at which adaptation and resilience challenges are emerging, and the range of data, tools and methods required. An approach based on transformational relationship-and capacity-building, which is capable of drawing on and informing science, service and practice is needed. Working at the science-to-service-to-practice interfaces to enable delivery of services aimed at informing action at scale will require new ways of collecting, analysing and using information and data about the effectiveness of climate actions in particular contexts.

Owing to a lack of understanding, and data being unavailable, unusable or unsuitable, weather and climate information is currently underutilized in Sustainable Development Goal implementation. Improvements are essential in knowledge brokering, clarifying responsibilities, multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder governance arrangements and research on systemic risks and decisions.

In this final paper, the guest editors identify and discuss ten guidelines emerging from the papers in this Special Issue on Decision-Support Tools for Climate Change Adaptation. The guidelines are arranged under three headings: foundational, design and construction, and supporting sustainability in the long term. Under foundational, we address the need for co-operation with end users of decision-support resources, the contribution these resources can make to the formation of thriving communities of practice, and the match between the different types of decision support and user needs. Under design and construction, we point to the risk that policy settings will change over the multiple years required to build and publish complex decision-support resources, reducing the relevance of the final product. We discuss the need for innovative approaches to ensure visibility, credibility and hence uptake. Developers should be mindful of the requirements, resources and capabilities of potential users at all points in the design and build. We also suggest that decision-support resources may be transferable between sectors and locations, but the motivation should be around achieving excellence, and not just cost savings. Under supporting sustainability in the long term, we stress the need for evaluation and comparative studies of performance, leading to carefully documented updating and improvement of decision-support resources. Finally, in the conclusions, we look to the future. Can decision-support resources evolve successfully to meet the information and guidance requirements of the increasingly sophisticated adaptation practitioner community?

As increasing evidence shows that the risks of climate change are mounting, there is a call for further climate action (both reducing global emissions, and adaptation to better manage the risks of climate change). To promote and enable adaptation, governments have introduced, or are considering introducing, reporting on climate risks and efforts being taken to address those risks. This paper reports on an analysis of the first two rounds of such reports submitted under the UK Climate Change Act (2008) Adaptation Reporting Power. It highlights benefits and challenges for reporting authorities and policymakers receiving the reports that could also inform other countries considering such reporting. For reporting authorities, benefits arise from the reporting process and resulting reports. These benefits include elevating climate risks and adaptation to the corporate level and with stakeholders, alongside facilitating alignment and integration of actions within existing risk management and governance structures. For policymakers, reporting provides enhanced understanding of climate risks and actions from a bottom-up perspective that can be integrated into national-level assessments and adaptation planning processes. The identified challenges are those related to capacity and process. These include limited risk and adaptation assessment capacities; relevance of climate change risks and adaptation in the context of other urgent risks and actions; reporting process effectiveness and robustness; and the provision of effective and sufficiently comprehensive support, including feedback.Key policy insights Effective adaptation reporting needs to be designed and delivered so as to enhance the value of the reporting process and resulting reports both for those reporting and those receiving the reports, as well as from the broader policy perspective.Providing a positive and supportive reporting environment is critical to encourage participation and facilitating contiuous learning and improvement, while also facilitating delivery of policy-relevant adaptation reports.Contributions of adaptation reporting can be enhanced by an inclusive reporting requirement involving a broader organizational mix that enables more effective risk management and reporting that reflects associated (inter)dependencies and consistency with the more comprehensive post-2015 resilience agenda (Paris Agreement, Sendai Framework for DRR and UN Agenda 2030 SDGs).

The research literature on climate change adaptation has increased strongly in recent years, (Haunschild et al. 2016).Burkett et al. (2014) recorded 4239 publications in five languages containing the search terms Bclimate change^and Badaptation^in the title, abstract or keywords in the decade 2001-2010 compared with 20 in the decade 1981-1990.Despite this growth in research output, it remains the case that adaptation is essentially a practical activity, carried out in response to or in anticipation of the impacts of climate change (Tompkins et al. 2010; Corfee-Morlot et al. 2011), or in response to policy and investment requirements (EEA 2013;TCFD 2017).The adaptation process is not necessarily undertaken by people for whom climate change is a central concern (Porter and Dessai 2017).A typical adaptor might be, for example an environmental manager based in a local authority whose primary responsibility is to oversee waste disposal and street lighting, who has been charged to ensure that the community and its assets are resilient to climate change (Measham et al. 2011;McClure and Baker 2018).Key barriers and drivers for such actors are listed in Table 1.To address the needs of adaptors, online resources have emerged that provide information and guidance in support of adaptation.Earlier resources had the primary goal of delivering climate and climate change data from observations and modelling experiments to inform policy-and decision-makers about past, present, and future climate conditions (e.g.

The potential for transferring and translating existing adaptation to climate change decision-support tools for use in different settings provides both opportunities and challenges to those wanting to support such decisions in or for the targeted community/organisation. The opportunities are related to being able to build on an existing credible and tested tool and its supportive resources and foregoing the costs associated with developing such themselves. The challenges relate to taking advantages of the strengths of an existing tool whilst adapting it and its supportive resources such that they are fit for purpose and accepted within the targeted community/organisation. This paper identifies and explores these opportunities and challenges through those revealed as a result of transferring and translating the UKCIP Adaptation Wizard for use within other parts of the world and in different communities and organisations. Whilst drawing on a number of different examples of where the Wizard has been translated, this paper particularly focuses on the transfer and translation for use in Portugal and in Brazil. General lessons learnt related to transferring adaptation decision-support tools are identified and used to develop a practical framework. The intention is to provide insights that have broader implications for those considering transferring similar adaptation decision-support tools, but also for tool developers who want to see their tools being used more broadly.

Disasters and climate change have significant implications for human health worldwide. Both climate change and the climate-sensitive hazards that result in disasters, are discussed in terms of direct and indirect impacts on health. A growing body of literature has argued for the need to link disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. However, there is limited articulation of the commonalities between these health impacts. Understanding the shared risk pathways is an important starting point for developing joint strategies for adapting to, and reducing, health risks. Therefore, this article discusses the common aspects of direct and indirect health risks of climate change and climate-sensitive disasters. Based on this discussion a theoretical framework is presented for understanding these commonalities. As such, this article hopes to extend the current health impact frameworks and provide a platform for further research exploring opportunities for linked adaptation and risk reduction strategies.

While seasonal outlooks have been operational for many years, until recently the extended-range timescale referred to as subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) has received little attention. S2S prediction fills the gap between short-range weather prediction and long-range seasonal outlooks. Decisions in a range of sectors are made in this extended-range lead time; therefore, there is a strong demand for this new generation of forecasts. International efforts are under way to identify key sources of predictability, improve forecast skill and operationalize aspects of S2S forecasts; however, challenges remain in advancing this new frontier. If S2S predictions are to be used effectively, it is important that, along with science advances, an effort is made to develop, communicate and apply these forecasts appropriately. In this study, the emerging operational S2S forecasts are presented to the wider weather and climate applications community by undertaking the first comprehensive review of sectoral applications of S2S predictions, including public health, disaster preparedness, water management, energy and agriculture. The value of applications-relevant S2S predictions is explored, and the opportunities and challenges facing their uptake are highlighted. It is shown how social sciences can be integrated with S2S development, from communication to decision-making and valuation of forecasts, to enhance the benefits of climate services' approaches for extended-range forecasting. While S2S forecasting is at a relatively early stage of development, it is concluded that it presents a significant new window of opportunity that can be explored for application-ready capabilities that could allow many sectors the opportunity to systematically plan on a new time horizon.

While climate change is a global phenomenon, the activities that contribute to climate change and its impacts are inherently local. Accumulating evidence within national and UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments (IPCC, 2013 and 2014), special reports (IPCC, 2012) and from recent extreme events indicates that all countries have elements of society, economy and environment that are vulnerable to a variable and changing climate. According to the IPCC, global surface temperature change for the end of the twenty-first century is likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels, with warming projected to continue beyond 2100. Warming and precipitation changes will be much more pronounced at different locations (IPCC, 2013). Continued variability, shifts in seasons, and climate extremes – such as heat waves and more frequent and intense precipitation events – will continue to cause harm. Climate change manifests through two different time dimensions: those over the long-term and those that occur abruptly. While it is easier to investigate the potential impacts of climate hazards and extreme weather events (acute hazards such as typhoons, heat spells or severe storms that last only for a short period), slow-onset events (long-term, gradual changes to an area's average precipitation, temperature and seasons) such as drought and sea level can be just as detrimental or beneficial as the more flashy events. These types of changes can exceed thresholds, sensitivities and coping mechanisms for a group of people or system, and cause a cascade of impacts detrimental or beneficial to other groups or systems. The impacts of these projected changes are expected to be many and serious for both natural and human systems. The core systems (e.g. agriculture,electricity generation and water, among others) upon which humanity depends for livelihoods, safety and well-being are exposed and sensitive to being affected by climate variability1 and change. Around the world, socio-economic development has sometimes increased vulnerability. This is due to increasing demographic pressures and ageing populations, as well as resource-use pressures and previous policy choices made in pursuit of economic growth and development. This chapter provides an overview of current ideas and practices around adaptation planning processes, as well as the movement from these to develop adaptation policies and actions. The primary goals of adaptation planning processes are to be able to develop policies and actions that meet stakeholderagreed criteria and values – e.g. equity, feasibility and minimisation of environmental impact or economic development – while trying to avoid maladaptation. As such, the chapter also discusses the common challenges and difficulties researchers, practitioners, businesses and policy makers are facing in moving from understanding vulnerabilities and climate risks to actually being able to decide what policies and actions are required and implementing them. Even with growing scientific knowledge about the likely impacts of climate change, moving forward with adaptation planning, policies and actions has not been easy, and levels of action on national to global scales are relatively slow (Brown et al., 2011). The chapter is structured around core concepts and steps in adaptation planning that have been developed through trial-and-error experiences in disaster risk reduction, sustainable livelihoods and development and climate adaptation programmes. These concepts and steps in planning are evolving and are intended to assist in addressing the many challenges and common barriers that slow or prevent adaptation policies and actions, which are also discussed in this chapter. Knowing some of the common barriers to adaptation provides context to the monumental challenges facing China in continuing to improve the lives and livelihoods of its people. Like many other developing countries, the critical question facing China is how to develop adaptation policies and mechanisms in the context of an already complex development environment that has already led to severe environmental degradation. The challenge for China, an emerging world power, is to address the risks and opportunities presented by climate change while also addressing long-term socio-economic needs and, in particular, the needs of diverse rural and urban vulnerable populations in more sustainable ways in an uncertain climate future. This chapter also serves as a guide which can be used to interpret the other chapters of this book. As with many nations, China has begun adaptation planning – a flexible, reflective step-by-step process – with the intent of understanding its complex vulnerabilities and moving toward policies and actions aimed at building resilience to an uncertain future. This chapter describes emerging concepts and phases in adaptation planning processes, how these ideally lead topolicies and action, and the challenges in making adaptation happen. China is finding it difficult to identify, prioritise and implement comprehensive guiding policies on provincial and national levels that enable actions at the local level, similar to adaptation planning efforts in other countries and shares many of the adaptation challenges described by this chapter. Many of the chapters in this book describe either the social vulnerabilities of China's diverse peoples (Chapters 8, 9 and 10) or the biophysical impacts of climate change on key sectors like water or agriculture (Chapters 4 to 7). The chapters also discuss the various policies that China has instituted in various sectors to begin addressing climate change. They acknowledge the challenges and difficulties China is facing in moving from often conflicting and sector-siloed policies to implementable actions.