It is no longer viable to hope that cutting greenhouse gas emissions will be enough to remove the risks of climate change. Successful adaptation to minimize these risks is necessary. But, the world is missing a playbook of proven adaptation actions and policies that work. A new tool provides groundwork for that playbook.
The Climate Impact Lab’s Adaptation Inventory highlights policies and programs that have been shown to reduce climate impacts and improve resiliency in communities around the world. By providing this inventory for policymakers and people, the Lab is ensuring that the most effective adaptation solutions have the opportunity to continue to be applied, improved and—over time—scaled effectively. It reflects the Lab’s next phase, moving beyond measuring the impacts of climate change to also becoming the go-to home for credible information on how to adapt to a warming world.
“Everyone from multinational funding organizations to government leaders to farmers on the ground need insight into how to adapt to climate change because, in the regions most impacted by climate change, the time to act is now and every dollar needs to count,” says Tamma Carleton, Faculty Head of Research at the Climate Impact Lab and an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. “Our Adaptation Inventory captures what we know and begins to peel back what we don’t know, guiding us as researchers as well as decision makers who are working in their communities to bring programs to scale.”
The programs catalogued in the Adaptation Inventory have been rigorously evaluated by the global climate economics research community, published in peer-reviewed and other academic journals, and reviewed by Carleton and her co-authors Esther Duflo, Kelsey Jack and Guglielmo Zappalà. In addition to providing decision makers with policy ideas they could possibly test in their communities, the Inventory is also a valuable tool to the research community—uncovering unexplored areas to further analyze, test and refine.
The policies and programs are divided by sector, including agriculture, health, housing and labor, as well as cross-cutting programs that target risks to education, income, and more. They address key hazards that arise from climate change like extreme temperatures and changes in the frequency of storms, flooding and droughts.
The adaptation approaches included in the Inventory range from providing support for growing salinity-tolerant rice in soils affected by sea level rise in Bangladesh, to the deployment of community healthcare workers to reduce heat-related infant mortality in India, and the introduction of mobile money services to enhance household resilience and maintain consumption after rainfall shocks in Tanzania.
“After a decade of work on estimating the costs of climate change, the Climate Impact Lab is now laser focused on identifying the places most in need of adaptation and the investments that will be most successful in mitigating climate change,” says Michael Greenstone, one of the founders of the Climate Impact Lab and the director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth and Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “Providing a snapshot of what is already working is a first step. But it is critical that we target the hardest hit areas with strategies tailored to their needs. Filling this gap is the task that we have set for ourselves in the coming months and years.”
The Climate Impact Lab was formed in 2014 to provide the first large-scale empirical projections of the local and global costs of climate change. In the subsequent decade, the Lab has published research in the world’s leading scientific and economics journals that has provided projections of the impacts of climate change on mortality, agricultural productivity, labor supply, energy demand and coastal flooding risk. This research has formed the basis for the US Government’s official estimate of the cost of climate change, served as the basis for the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Climate Horizons platform, provided the analysis for the International Monetary Fund and Federal Reserve, and undergirded work by private companies (e.g., Nike and Microsoft).
In 2025, the Lab began a new phase of work that aims to identify where and when adaptation to climate change is most needed and to identify specific adaptation investments that have the highest payoff. Ultimately, its aim is to develop a global playbook of tested climate adaptations to address the greatest challenges in the most vulnerable regions.