Most businesses, public agencies, and local authorities now recognise climate change as a threat (Ruiz-Campillo et al., 2021). But far fewer understand what this means for how they operate, the decisions they make, or the risks their systems and sectors might face.
Most policy and organisational conversations now use the language of “adaptation,” but many adaptation efforts still operate within business-as-usual assumptions. In other words, they make small adjustments to reduce immediate exposure (e.g. raising flood defences, updating emergency plans, retrofitting assets). Without a doubt, incremental and immediate solutions are necessary and often urgent. However, they do not address the deeper conditions that make people and systems vulnerable in the first place. To break the vicious cycle of vulnerability–risk–disaster, structural factors must be prioritised.
It is important to understand that vulnerability is not created by climate hazards alone; it is produced through social, economic, and institutional arrangements that distribute risk unevenly (Hulme, 2011; Pelling, 2001). When adaptation focuses only on short-term technical fixes, those structural conditions remain untouched and, in some cases, are reinforced (Blythe et al., 2018). This is why transformational adaptation is needed.
Transformational adaptation explicitly addresses the underlying drivers of vulnerability, such as governance structures, marginalisation and exclusion, social and economic inequities, dominant values and worldviews, and fragmented decision systems (Lonsdale et al., 2015). It also recognises that lasting resilience requires shifts in how we make decisions, allocate resources, and understand our responsibilities and relationships within communities (Nightingale et al., 2019). Introducing vulnerability and systemic change upfront is therefore crucial, as without recognising these deeper dynamics, adaptation risks becoming simply a technocratic exercise that manages the symptoms without transforming the systems that cause risk.
Incremental adaptation is like dealing with the leaks in a house built decades ago on land that has since become prone to flooding. You can install better drains, add weather-stripping, or place sandbags by the door. Those fixes may work for the next storm or two, but tides are rising, storms intensifying, and the foundations were never designed to withstand repeated floods. With each new extreme weather event, water finds a different way in. Transformational adaptation is redesigning the house so it can truly withstand flooding — and doing so with the people who live there. It means asking what “safety” and “liveability” look like for different occupants, what materials and structures are needed for future storms as well as everyday life, and whether the community now requires entirely new ways of living with water. Rather than chasing each leak as it appears, transformational adaptation confronts why the house keeps flooding in the first place, and why flooding has become a problem.
The capabilities required for transformational change
To engage meaningfully with transformational adaptation, the first requirement is ensuring that the necessary skills and capacities (human, organisational, and conceptual) are widely available across sectors and professional communities (Boon et al. 2021). Without this foundation, practitioners cannot adequately interpret the realities of the present climate, nor can they design adaptation pathways that unlock fair, sustainable futures (Pelling and High, 2008). This is precisely why training cannot remain a peripheral activity or a “nice to have.” It is a strategic necessity: without deliberate investment in building the capabilities needed to understand vulnerability, navigate complexity, and address structural inequality, transformational adaptation will remain an aspiration rather than an achievable practice. As a result, we will face a future where climate change is a risk borne disproportionately by a sub-sector of society—those who are vulnerable, racialised, marginalised, excluded from decision-making, and invisible within our systems.
However, learning to do transformational adaptation is not simply about using new tools or adjusting existing procedures. It requires people, at every level of an organisation, to think differently about climate change, risk, uncertainty, justice, and responsibility (O’Brien et al., 2013).
Yet most current training systems are:
- Technical, focused on climate data or tools (Brasseur & Gallardo, 2016).
- Siloed, separated by departments or professional identities (Vincent et al., 2018).
- Short-term, not designed for long-term institutional learning (Weichselgartner & Arheimer, 2019)
- Reactive, triggered by extreme events rather than structural need (Kwauk & Casey, 2022).
This leaves organisations with fragmented knowledge and competing priorities. This pattern mirrors wider critiques of climate adaptation practice, where responses often remain technocratic, sectoral, and insufficiently attentive to values, power, and structural vulnerability (Adams et al., 2021; Eriksen et al., 2021).
Building training that transforms systems, not Just knowledge
To address this need, the Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC) Hub in an effort to address risks and advance transformational adaptation, is exploring new approaches to training and capacity building that challenge the social and political structures producing vulnerability. This exploration draws on O’Brien et al.’s (2013) framework of the personal, political, and practical spheres, which argues that adaptation becomes transformational when deeper structures, values, and systems are addressed. In other words, transformational efforts engage with practical aspects, such as new skills for working with climate information, scenario planning, and systems mapping; it is a politicised process, where actors have the ability to recognise and challenge power relations, institutional constraints, and governance assumptions; and it is also a personal process, where individuals and communities reflect on values, worldviews, emotions, and the relational dimensions of adaptation.
Similarly, research on transformative and relational learning highlights that people learn most effectively when cognitive, emotional, and practical dimensions are engaged together— what some call “head, hands, and heart” learning (Sipos et al., 2008). We believe that these dimensions are essential for addressing vulnerability, inequity, and the root causes of climate risk while learning to do adaptation. For that reason, the MACC Hub is exploring the development of a training format for transformational adaptation. We identify as essential in any training for adaptation the active and horizontal engagement of stakeholders, communities, and professionals in problem-solving efforts (Vincent et al., 2018). This engagement should also help each of the participants to question assumptions, reflect on decision-making cultures, and examine how vulnerability and risk are framed (Boyd & Osbahr, 2010). Given the diversity of actors, such engagement can enable climate risk to be approached holistically taking socio-ecological systems into account. Finally, training must equip people to understand feedback loops, thresholds, cascading impacts, and long-term trajectories (Nguyen et al., 2023).
To design training that truly enables transformational adaptation, it is essential to build a clear understanding of the current landscape. This involves identifying the knowledge professionals already possess and the areas where they feel most confident, while also pinpointing the skills that are most urgently needed. Equally important is recognising the organisational constraints that influence how training is adopted and determining which learning formats are most effective. Attention must also be given to gaps in systems thinking, collaboration, and reflexive practice, as well as to how considerations of power, equity, and vulnerability are integrated, or overlooked, within decision-making processes. Together, these insights will provide the foundation for training that not only responds to climate challenges but actively transforms the structures that perpetuate risk.
The survey we are inviting you to take gathers insights across these areas to identify gaps and priorities systematically. It is aimed at understanding not only individual competencies but also organisational culture, structural barriers, and preferred learning modes.
The results will help ensure that training equips people not only to adapt to climate change, but to transform the systems that produce vulnerability in the first place. We invite professionals across sectors to participate in the survey and contribute to shaping the next generation of climate adaptation training. The more diverse the responses, the stronger and more inclusive the resulting strategy will be.