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"Is it adaptation or is it development?"

The question has bedeviled the adaptation policy community for well over a decade. Despite a more sophisticated understanding of adaptation, greater political recognition of its importance in responding to the climate crisis and, crucially, more resources than ever for its implementation, funders and practitioners continue to ask fundamental questions about what constitutes adaptation and how to distinguish it from other non-adaptive activities.

In this blog post, Anne Hammill and Heather McGray revisit “the adaptation continuum” they developed in 2007 to provide a framework that proposed a range of what adaptation can look like. On the left-hand side of the continuum lay “business-as-usual” development activities focused on addressing the roots of vulnerability. On the right were discernably “business unusual” activities, which are explicitly about addressing the impacts of climate change.