Opportunities for pathways approaches for adapting to complex climate change risks

Abstract

Adaptation planning is increasingly challenged under conditions of complex climate change risks, which are characterized by the dynamic interactions between compounding hazards, cascading impacts, governance failures, and multiple drivers of vulnerabilities, producing non-linear impacts and frequently irreversible outcomes. Pathways approaches have seen growing application over the past decade and a half to support adaptation planning by structuring sequences of adaptation options that can be adjusted depending on how the future unfolds as risk conditions evolve. While valuable for managing uncertainty and avoiding lock-in, more limited attention has been given to how pathways can support adaptation to cascading impacts, cross-sectoral interdependencies, and rapidly evolving non-linear risk conditions associated with complex climate change risks. In this article, we identify opportunities for pathways approaches to support adaptation to complex climate change risks. By synthesizing recent advances, emerging challenges, and future research directions across three domains of research, namely collaborative learning, overshoot, and transformational recovery after loss and damage, we position how the iterative learning, flexibility, and governance orientation of pathways approaches can be extended to address the distinctive adaptation demands that complex climate change risks generate. These demands include epistemic complexity and contested decision-making, non-linear risk conditions and irreversible system change under overshoot conditions, and recovery lock-in under escalating loss and damage. By integrating these literatures, we articulate ways forward and a research agenda for extending pathways approaches as governance mechanisms to support more inclusive, flexible, and resilient adaptation to complex climate change risks in the decades ahead.