Can Climate Adaptation Be Sustainable?

Abstract

Climate impacts like heatwaves, droughts, and extreme storms increasingly force organizations to adapt. Many adaptation strategies are unsustainable: actions that protect firms today can deplete ecological resources, create new vulnerabilities, or shift risks onto other communities and future generations. We argue that adaptation becomes sustainable only when understood not as reactive adjustment but as organizational and institutional transformation within planetary limits. We identify a theoretical blind spot in management research, which has focused mainly on mitigation while overlooking the unique challenges adaptation poses to organizations. Drawing on examples from the wine industry, we illustrate how maladaptive practices emerge and why adaptation raises distinctive organizational challenges. We outline a research agenda to advance sustainable adaptation by avoiding maladaptation, balancing short- and long-term horizons, and navigating firm- and collective-level decision-making. This agenda centers on adaptation’s unique ecological embeddedness, deep uncertainty, and how its risks and responsibilities are temporally and spatially distributed.