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  • Perspective
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Present and future limits to climate change adaptation

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 336–342 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sustainable economic development and resilience to climate change impacts require human adaptation to a warming climate. It is possible that rising costs of climate change will provide incentives to increase adaptation actions in the future. This Perspective argues, by contrast, that adaptation to the costs of global warming is likely to be ineffective. Empirical evidence suggests that current adaptations are generally limited, and climate change is likely to undermine adaptive capacity, making intensification of the costs of warming as likely as adaptation to them. Climate adaptation will require difficult political action and is not an inevitable consequence of climate damages.

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Fig. 1: Schematics of income- and exposure-based adaptation.
Fig. 2: Shifts in the damage function over time.

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Acknowledgements

I thank J. S. Mankin and C. E. Kernan for helpful discussions. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship no. 1840344.

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  1. Christopher W. Callahan

    Present address: Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

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  1. Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Christopher W. Callahan

  2. Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Christopher W. Callahan

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  1. Christopher W. Callahan
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Correspondence to Christopher W. Callahan.

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Callahan, C.W. Present and future limits to climate change adaptation. Nat Sustain 8, 336–342 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01519-7

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