Abstract
Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthesis of the resulting 1,682 articles presents a systematic and comprehensive global stocktake of implemented human adaptation to climate change. Documented adaptations were largely fragmented, local and incremental, with limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk reduction outcomes. We identify eight priorities for global adaptation research: assess the effectiveness of adaptation responses, enhance the understanding of limits to adaptation, enable individuals and civil society to adapt, include missing places, scholars and scholarship, understand private sector responses, improve methods for synthesizing different forms of evidence, assess the adaptation at different temperature thresholds, and improve the inclusion of timescale and the dynamics of responses. Determining progress in adaptation to climate change is challenging, yet critical as climate change impacts increase. A stocktake of the scientific literature on implemented adaptation now shows that adaptation is mostly fragmented and incremental, with evidence lacking for its impact on reducing risk.
Highlights
In the absence of systematic, global data on adaptation practices, adaptation actions documented in the academic literature provide a valuable complement to efforts to track adaptation on the ground
We identified only 1,682 articles that met our inclusion criteria from >48,000, which highlights that only a small fraction of the broader adaptation literature (
Search strings were developed for each bibliographic database
Summary
Adaptation intends to reduce the adverse effects of climate change and, in some cases, to take advantage of new opportunities. Our findings are consistent with evidence that the vulnerability assessment literature remains largely temperature agnostic[130]; the literature on adaptation implementation is likewise underdeveloped with regards to outcomes under different temperature scenarios, and disconnected from mitigation and warming estimates This disconnect is partly because mitigation and warming estimates do not translate hazard trends into environmental and societal impacts that are a prerequisite to understanding and discussing adaptation needs and responses. Several review papers document the geographical distribution of authors in the field of climate change and adaptation, with concentrations in the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia[121,122] This authorship distribution is not reflective of our mapping of the study areas of literature that documents adaptation responses, which is largest in Asia and Africa. Additional references, Nature Research reporting summaries, source data, extended data, supplementary information, acknowledgements, peer review information; details of author contributions and competing interests; and statements of data and code availability are available at https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41558-021-01170-y
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