Climate change is already impacting our everyday lives. Record-breaking temperatures, more frequent coastal flooding, prolonged droughts, and damaging storms are just some of the intensifying risks we face as our planet continues to warm. And these changes are projected to accelerate over the next few decades, with serious implications for the health and welfare of every community around the world and the performance of every sector of the economy.
For humanity to thrive, policies to confront climate change must immediately begin to treat adaptation as a co-equal partner with mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Communities must confront the climate impacts they are facing today and those they are projected to face in the years to come. But just as one cannot get where they are going without a map, adaptation to climate change cannot succeed without knowing where it is needed most and what investments will deliver the greatest payoffs. The Climate Impact Lab is providing that roadmap, with the aim of developing a global playbook of data-driven, tested adaptation strategies to address the greatest impacts in the most vulnerable regions.
The adaptation challenge
Governments are increasingly prioritizing the need to adapt to climate change, with nearly every country having a National Adaptation Plan in place or actively developing one. At the same time, the United Nations has called on governments and philanthropies to increase their financial support to help communities adapt. They are responding. In 2024, a group of more than 60 philanthropies joined hands for this cause, while in 2025 countries set a goal of tripling international adaptation finance.
Unfortunately, the recognition of adaptation’s central importance is matched by a very poor understanding of where it is needed most and what strategies will work best in those places. In this vacuum, decision-makers all too often must rely on fads, assumptions, and ultimately must make guesses. For example, while tropical cyclones capture headlines and generate large losses, ten times more people are impacted by extreme heat. The Climate Impact Lab is working to transform understanding about adaptation and ensure that limited resources are spent as effectively as possible.
Building off a decade of evidence-based research
The Lab’s global network of economists, climate scientists, data engineers, and risk analysts have spent the last decade building the world’s most comprehensive body of research quantifying the impacts of climate change, sector-by-sector and community-by-community around the world. This work, published in the world’s leading scientific and economic journals, has produced projections of the impacts of climate change on mortality, agricultural productivity, labor supply, energy demand and coastal flooding risk.
The Lab additionally monetized and aggregated those impacts to produce the world’s first empirically derived estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC)—the cost to society and the economy from each ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The SCC is an essential tool for incorporating climate impacts into cost-benefit analyses for policymaking, corporate planning, and investment decision-making.
The research formed the basis for the US Government’s social cost of carbon and has been used by the International Monetary Fund and Federal Reserve, private companies like Nike, Microsoft and Realtor.com, and the United Nations Development Programme in building their Human Climate Horizons data platform.
Leveraging this decade of research and rich global datasets, the Lab is well poised to provide governments, funders, businesses, and people on the ground with rigorous estimates of climate change impacts to identify where they most threaten human well-being. This work will provide decision-makers frontier information on the challenges they face and allow them to set priorities based on cutting-edge research. Outside of providing guidance to target funding and help set adaptation priorities, the insights will help the academic community identify new areas of research and assess the efficacy of adaptation policies and programs to inform where and how they can potentially be scaled.
The Climate Impact Lab is part of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). Learn more here.
