By Hemant Ojha | 12 October 2025
As the Adaptation Futures conference opens here in Christchurch, New Zealand, scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and community leaders from across the globe are gathering to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time: how humanity can adapt to the escalating climate crisis. This biennial gathering serves as a critical forum for sharing knowledge, practical insights, and policy innovations related to adaptation, sustainability, human wellbeing, and development. Yet, as we come together to take stock of our progress, a sobering reality confronts us: despite meaningful discussions and incremental advances, the pace of climate impacts far outstrips our current adaptation efforts
The Inadequacy of Current Adaptation Approaches
The climate crisis is worsening at an alarming rate, and while there has been considerable discourse around enhanced adaptation strategies such as localizing adaptation, supporting locally-led initiatives, and strengthening national adaptation processes,the fundamental question remains: Are doing enough?. The uncomfortable truth is that we are not. The current pace of adaptation is clearly inadequate when measured against the velocity and magnitude of climate impacts bearing down on vulnerable communities worldwide.
Around the developing world, we are witnessing increasing climate losses and damagesresulting from unaverted and unminimized impacts. This reality demands honest reflection on our approach. We can no longer afford to discuss adaptation as though it follows a natural, linear progression. The situation is more akin to passengers on a sinking boat frantically bailing out water while ignoring the hole in the hull. If water enters faster than it can be removed, the boat will inevitably sink. Similarly, if climate impacts accelerate faster than our adaptation measures can address them, we face catastrophic consequences.
The Need for Transformational Change
This urgent context brings us to two critical imperatives that should frame our discussions over the coming days. First, we must embrace more transformational approaches to adaptation. For those uncomfortable with the language of “transformation,” consider it simply as acceleration but acceleration of a fundamentally different kind. The conference theme itself acknowledges this need to accelerate, yet acceleration within the existing paradigm will prove insufficient. We need acceleration accompanied by a different mindset, operating within different systems, and guided by different attitudes and outlooks.
The critical question that should animate our conversations here becomes: How can we achieve this transformation across different contexts, scales, and timeframes? What does transformational adaptation look like in a small island nation versus a sprawling urban center? How do we tailor approaches to diverse cultural, economic, and ecological contexts while maintaining the urgency and ambition required? These are not merely academic questions but practical challenges that demand immediate attention and innovative solutions.
Transformational adaptation requires us to question fundamental assumptions about development pathways, economic models, and societal structures. It means moving beyond incremental adjustments to existing systems and instead reimagining how communities, economies, and ecosystems can function in a climate-altered world. This might involve relocating vulnerable populations, fundamentally restructuring agricultural systems, redesigning urban infrastructure, or completely rethinking water management approaches. The scale of change required is daunting, but the alternative—continuing with inadequate measures—is untenable.
Fishing families in Bangladesh coastal areas. (Photoo: Hemant Ojha and ICCCAD Bangladesh)
Embracing Loss and Damage
The second imperative addresses a more fundamental limitation that we must grapple with during this conference. Adaptation as a conceptual framework and language carries inherent constraints that may prevent us from fully addressing the climate crisis. We must acknowledge that some impacts cannot be adapted to and they will result in irreversible losses and damages that demand recognition, response, and redress.
The language and framework of Loss and Damage (L&D) have already been institutionalized and accepted within climate policy circles, with a long history of advocacy and negotiation behind it. Now is the time to recognize losses and damages not as a failure of adaptation but as an unavoidable domain that exists alongside adaptation efforts. This recognition is not defeatist; rather, it represents a mature, realistic assessment of climate impacts and a commitment to justice for those bearing the heaviest burdens.
Critically, embracing the L&D framework opens pathways to mobilize additional resources grounded in climate justice principles. This approach acknowledges historical responsibilities and differential capacities, ensuring that those least responsible for causing climate change but most vulnerable to its impacts receive adequate support. It represents a shift from viewing climate response purely through a technical or developmental lens to incorporating ethical and justice dimensions.
Integrating Climate Justice with Climate Action
The ultimate goal that should guide our work here must be to accelerate resilience building in a more just manner by integrating climate justice with climate action interventions. This integration means ensuring that adaptation and L&D responses do not merely maintain existing inequalities but actively work to address them. It means centering on the voices and priorities of affected communities, particularly those in developing nations who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions yet face the most severe consequences.
Climate justice integration requires examining who benefits from adaptation investments, who makes decisions about adaptation priorities, and how resources are distributed. It demands transparency, accountability, and genuine participation from vulnerable communities rather than top-down imposition of solutions designed by distant experts. It also means addressing the root causes of vulnerability, including poverty, marginalization, and unequal power relations that determine who suffers most from climate impacts.
Furthermore, a climate justice approach recognizes that L&D finance cannot simply be repackaged development assistance or loans that increase debt burdens. It must represent new, additional resources provided as compensation for harm caused, not charity or conditional aid. This distinction is fundamental to achieving just outcomes in climate response, and I hope it will be a central theme in our discussions here.
Communities in Emau Island of Vanuatu facing coastal erosion (Photo: Hemant Ojha and DoCC, Vanuatu)
Questions for Our Conversations Ahead
As we engage over the next few days across numerous panels and events, these concerns and questions should animate our discussions. This gathering represents an invaluable opportunity for the global adaptation community to engage with these challenging ideas, share experiences from diverse contexts, and collectively chart pathways forward.
The stakes could not be higher. Every delay in transforming our adaptation approaches, every year of inadequate action, translates directly into increased suffering, displacement, and loss of life and livelihoods. The developing world, in particular, cannot afford for the international community to continue with business as usual while climate impacts intensify.
The conference theme of acceleration must be taken seriously not only as a call for doing more of the same, faster but as a fundamental reimagining of how we approach climate adaptation. This requires courage to challenge established approaches, humility to learn from those on the frontlines of climate impacts, and commitment to justice as a non-negotiable principle guiding all climate action.
A Call to Action
The path forward demands that we acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the inadequacy of current efforts, embrace transformational change even when it requires disrupting comfortable paradigms, recognize loss and damage as an unavoidable reality requiring dedicated responses, and integrate climate justice principles into every aspect of climate action. Only through such comprehensive transformation can we hope to build resilience at the pace and scale required by the accelerating climate crisis.
The conversations beginning here in Christchurch must catalyze action that matches the urgency of our moment. The world is watching and those most vulnerable communities to climate impacts are waiting not for more talk, but for the transformational change that will determine whether they can survive and thrive in a climate-altered future.
I look forward to engaging with this community over the coming days, exploring these critical questions together, and working collectively toward the bold, just, and transformational approaches our world so desperately needs. The time for incremental thinking has passed. The time for courage, innovation, and justice-centered action is now.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the positions or views of the organisation with which the author is affiliated or those of the publishers. This blog is intended for general educational purposes only. The author and publishers do not assume, and hereby disclaim, any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by any errors, omissions, or any other cause associated with this blog.
