WHY SUBNATIONAL
ADAPTATION MATTERS:
Strenghtening subnational leadership in a new era of global adaptation
Climate adaptation has moved from the margins of climate policy to the centre of global climate action. As impacts intensify, resilience must be built where climate risks are experienced — in territories.
Where are we now?
The Evolution of Adaptation
Over the past three decades, climate adaptation has evolved from disaster response and risk assessments to long-term strategies embedded in infrastructure, governance, and investment decisions.
When the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, mitigation dominated political attention. Adaptation was acknowledged, yet often treated as secondary, reactive, or even as a signal of diminished mitigation ambition. Early efforts focused primarily on understanding risks and responding to disasters after they occurred.
Today, this framing has changed fundamentally, with adaptation no longer seen as optional or defensive, but as a structural pillar of climate action, alongside mitigation.
Scientific evidence has made clear that even the most ambitious emissions reductions cannot prevent all climate impacts already locked into the system.
Practice has evolved accordingly. What began as risk awareness and impact assessments has matured into long-term strategic planning embedded in public policy, investment, infrastructure standards, and service delivery. Increasingly, adaptation is understood as resilience by design: integrating climate risk and future scenarios directly into how territories plan, build, regulate, and invest from the outset.
This shift also changes how adaptation is valued. When framed solely as risk reduction, adaptation appears as a cost. When framed in terms of benefits – healthier communities, food security, ecosystem restoration, stable infrastructure, and resilient economies – it becomes an investment in sustainable development.
- 30 years of Adaptation under the Convention and the Paris Agreement: Report by the Adaptation Committee (UNFCCC ; 2024): An overview of how adaptation is addressed and supported in the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement processes (in English, French and Spanish).
- Conceptual history of adaptation in the UNFCCC process (Shipper; 2006): A research paper taking a closer look at the history of the concept of adaptation as applied in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Learn from
The Global Framework for Adaptation
Global frameworks are increasingly defining what effective adaptation looks like, and how progress is measured. From the Global Goal on Adaptation to new indicators, expectations are becoming clearer.
The Paris Agreement established the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), aiming to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate chage. For several years, however, adaptation lacked what mitigation possessed shared targets, clearer metrics, and structured global tracking.
Recent decisions under the UN climate process have begun to close this gap. At COP28, Parties adopted the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, setting out thematic and dimensional-targets across water, ecosystems, food systems, infrastructure, health, livelihoods and the adaptation policy cyle. Subsequent work has advanced indicators and reporting approaches to improve measurement and comparability.
For the first time, adaptation has a clear global framework, and current efforts to operationalize it aim to better define success, strengthen planning and implementation, improve transparency, target support effectively, and connect local, national, and global actions.
At the same time, global assessments consistently highlight a persistent adaptation gap : finance flows remain insufficient, project pipelines are uneven, institutional capacities vary significantly across countries and territories.
This reality reinforces a central insight: adaptation succeeds where it is implemented: in territories.
- RegionsAdapt Brief for Action on the Global Goal on Adaptation Indicators (Regions4, 2026):
- Multilevel Governance Coordination Mechanisms in the NAP process (NAP Global Network, 2025): An online inventory to provide an overview of the type of multilevel coordination mechanism that countries are using to advance their NAP processes.
The Global Framework for Adaptation
WATER
Climate-resilient water security for all
WATER
Significantly reducing climate-induced water scarcity and enhancing climate resilience to water-related hazards towards a climate-resilient water supply, climate-resilient sanitation and towards access to safe and affordable potable water for all
Food & Agriculture
Sustainable food and nutrition security for all
Food & Agriculture
Attaining climate-resilient food and agricultural production and supply and distribution of food, as well as increasing sustainable and regenerative production and equitable access to adequate food and nutrition for all
HEALTH
Climate-resilient health systems and services
HEALTH
Attaining resilience against climate change related health impacts, promoting climate-resilient health services, and significantly reducing climate-related morbidity and mortality, particularly in the most vulnerable communities
ECOSYSTEMS
Healthy ecosystems and biodiversity
ECOSYSTEMS
Reducing climate impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity, and accelerating the use of ecosystem-based adaptation and nature-based solutions, including through their management, enhancement, restoration and conservation and the protection of terrestrial, inland water, mountain, marine and coastal ecosystems
INFRASTRUCTURE & HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
Climate-resilient infrastructure and human settlements for all
INFRASTRUCTURE & HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
Increasing the resilience of infrastructure and human settlements to climate change impacts to ensure basic and continuous essential services for all, and minimizing climate-related impacts on infrastructure and human settlements
LIVELIHOODS
Climate-proof poverty reduction and livelihoods and climate-social protection measures for all
LIVELIHOODS
Substantially reducing the adverse effects of climate change on poverty eradication and livelihoods, in particular by promoting the use of adaptive social protection measures for all
CULTURAL HERITAGE
Climate-proof cultural heritage
CULTURAL HERITAGE
Protecting cultural heritage from the impacts of climate-related risks by developing adaptive strategies for preserving cultural practices and heritage sites and by designing climate-resilient infrastructure, guided by traditional knowledge, Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge and local knowledge systems
Why States, Provinces and Regions Matter
Effective adaptation depends on multi-level governance. National plans set direction, but delivery happens on the ground.
States, Provinces and Regions are operational centres of adaptation, often coordinating functions essentials to adaptation: Spatial planning, water governance, health systems, infrastructure standards, ecosystem management, disaster risk reduction, and social protection –
They:
• coordinate municipalities the rolling out of adaptation actions
• integrate climate risks into spatial planning and infrastructure standards
• manage ecosystems and water systems
• mobilise local actors and finance
As expectations evolve, the challenge is not just to plan adaptation, but to ensure it is credible, embedded in institutions and budgets, reduces risk, delivers measurable results and is fair and transformative.
- LGMA COP messaging elevating subnational voices in UNFCCC Processes
- Multilevel Governance Coordination Mechanisms in the NAP Process – NAP Global Network
- From-Ambition-to-Delivery-Scotland-and-the-Role-of-Sub-national-Climate-Action.pdf
Introducing RegionsAdapt Principles
While global frameworks define goals, regions need practical guidance to translate them into territorial action. This is the role of the RegionsAdapt initiative.
Building on a decade of decade of knowledge curation and peer exchange, RegionsAdapt has translated a decade of knowledge from over 85 regional governments into its RegionsAdapt Principles.
Read More
Building Regional Resilience
Defining RegionsAdapt Core Principles
RegionsAdapt Playbook
A step-by-step guidance on Subnational Adaptation