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It is increasingly recognized that — even with early and rapid mitigation — society will need to adapt to climate impacts. Researchers have now developed a framework to help policymakers and scientists identify barriers that could delay adaptation.

Susanne Moser, an independent policy analyst affiliated with Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleague Julia Ekstrom at the University of California, Berkeley, scoured hundreds of academic papers for information on barriers to climate adaptation and possible responses, from which they developed a framework based on common phases of rational decision-making: understanding the problem; developing, assessing, and selecting appropriate responses; and managing and evaluating the implementation of those responses.

The result, a multi-phase schema filled with concepts likely to be more familiar to people with MBAs than to scientists, is flexible enough to be applied to any type of climate adaptation, Moser suggests. By spotting where some of the most challenging obstacles to climate adaptation might lie, the schema provides scientists with a framework to assess which barriers are the most intractable, and policymakers with the opportunity to better allocate resources and to strategically design processes to overcome the obstacles.