Adaptation is broadly understood as a process to limit and manage the impacts of climate change which includes assessing risks, reducing vulnerabilities and preparing for and responding to extreme weather events.

The theory and practice of climate change adaptation and adaptation planning has evolved rapidly, particularly since the Fourth (2009) and Fifth (2014) IPCC Assessment Reports.

Ever since the perceived taboo on adaptation to climate change has been lifted (Pielke et al., 2007),

In this piece, we want to bring a critical decolonial lens to the question of adaptation, for it is clear that adaptation heralds some significant problems when understood as part of a wider settler-colonial structure of power, a structure that has of course produced the very conditions to which we now must adapt.

Adaptation planning and response is largely a place-based endeavour, constituting a social response to locally experienced climatic impacts. Adaptation planning must therefore be locally responsive, contextualised and necessarily involve the entanglements of socio-cultural practices and institutions.

In understanding adaptation as a social and institutional challenge, Keskitalo and Preston (2019, p. 8) argue the need to “look beyond what seems only observable, to understand on a more fundamental and theoretical level how the structure and function of society drives adaptation processes”