The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially ratified in September 2015 by the United Nations, have (hopefully) initiated a new chapter of the international development agenda. Going beyond the Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs explicitly integrate the environmental and socio-economic dimensions of development and set priorities for all countries. Goal 13 states the need to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, with particular emphasis on climate change adaptation in the form of strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate hazards and natural disasters across the globe (http://go.nature.com/sNrU5E). Indeed, history tells us that the development of human societies rests on their ability to adapt to change — and global climate change is by far the biggest adaptation challenge of our time.

But development, whether exclusively socio-economic or sustainable, is an old issue. Governments and international agencies have been working on development for a long time. We have achieved significant progress in poverty alleviation, global health and environmental restoration and conservation. However, there is still a lot to be done. Despite the progress, in too many cases things have gone wrong and plenty of financial resources have been wasted. To some extent, climate change adaptation projects seem to be following the same path. The success of adaptation initiatives, like for any other development initiatives, rests on a combination of factors that is often hard to fully assess at the time of designing an intervention.

In a recent Commentary (Nature Clim. Change 5, 616–618; 2015), Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues looked at specific adaptation initiatives in both developing and developed countries, and illustrated the type of economic, social and political competing interests that emerge during their implementation. For example, the authors showed how the Mnazi Bay–Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park — a protected marine area in Tanzania, set up to bolster the climate change resilience of its coral reefs — limited the traditional fishing activities of local villagers, which lead to their dependence on energy-intensive farming with higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions. This is a typical example of environmental–economic trade-offs that, if factored in at the time of designing the protected area, would have called for a parallel plan to develop sustainable economic activities in the affected villages.

Thinking along these lines is what social scientists refer to as a political economy approach. Political economy is the research field concerning struggle over power and resources, or the conditions by which some individuals, groups or institutions benefit from particular systems at the exclusion of others. Sovacool and co-workers created a political economy framework to help decision-makers identify the critical trade-offs of projects, and plan accordingly to avoid unintended consequences. The proposed framework has now been fully documented through the in-depth analysis of four new case studies by Sovacool and Linnér in their forthcoming book, The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation (http://go.nature.com/QjCMMU). Not only will the book inform climate adaptation researchers and practitioners, it will hopefully also inspire development experts.