Adaptive capacity, limits and barriers, transformational adaptation and the global stocktake of evidence: the adaptation papers cited most, with search strings.
Adaptation research is a social science as much as an environmental one. Four of the ten most-cited works on this page have W. Neil Adger as first author: on adaptation in the developing world (2003), social capital and collective action (2003), successful adaptation across scales (2005) and whether there are social limits to adaptation (2009). Moser and Ekstrom (2010) give a framework for diagnosing barriers, and Kates, Travis and Wilbanks (2012) introduce transformational adaptation. Berrang-Ford et al. (2021) is a systematic global stocktake of the evidence on human adaptation.
How the literature is organised
The oldest work on the page is conceptual: Smit et al. (2000), "An Anatomy of Adaptation to Climate Change and Variability". From 2003 a run of papers led by W. Neil Adger treats adaptation as a social process. Adger et al. (2003) examined adaptation in the developing world, Adger (2003) tied adaptation to social capital and collective action, and Adger, Arnell and Tompkins (2005) asked what successful adaptation means across scales. Grothmann and Patt (2005) added psychology, with a model of adaptive capacity built on human cognition.
A second group of papers deals with constraints. Adger et al. (2009) ask whether there are social limits to adaptation. Moser and Ekstrom (2010) offer a framework to diagnose barriers at each stage of a planned adaptation process. Kates, Travis and Wilbanks (2012) distinguish incremental from transformational adaptation, which they describe as adaptation at a much larger scale, new to a region or system, or involving a change of place.
Agriculture forms a third group: Lobell et al. (2008) analysed climate risks to crops in 12 food-insecure regions to set adaptation priorities for 2030, and Di Falco, Veronesi and Yesuf (2011) asked whether adaptation improves food security among Ethiopian farm households.
Main debates
How should success be judged? Adger, Arnell and Tompkins (2005) raised the question early, and Singh et al. (2022) interrogate the idea of effectiveness and propose 11 guiding principles for research and practice. A related debate is about justice: Chu and Cannon (2021) review equity, inclusion and justice as criteria for adaptation decisions in cities.
Where recent work is heading
The global stocktake by Berrang-Ford et al. (2021) is the most-cited recent review. Other recent well-cited work covers nature-based solutions (Seddon, 2022), coasts and sea-level rise (Griggs and Reguero, 2021), urban flood risk (Cea and Costabile, 2022), agricultural extension (Antwi-Agyei and Stringer, 2021) and the feasibility of options across Africa (Williams et al., 2021).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Robert W. Kates, William R. Travis, Thomas J. Wilbanks (2012). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cited by 1,292Open accessdoi:10.1073/pnas.1115521109
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Farzaneh Shaikh Khatibi and 3 others (2021). Discover Sustainability.
Cited by 257Open accessdoi:10.1007/s43621-021-00024-z
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Portia Adade Williams and 4 others (2021). Environmental Research Letters.
Cited by 181Open accessdoi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac092d
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 23,951 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
21
2001
27
2002
22
2003
41
2004
40
2005
69
2006
85
2007
125
2008
260
2009
619
2010
784
2011
806
2012
909
2013
1,173
2014
1,240
2015
1,226
2016
1,073
2017
1,179
2018
1,169
2019
1,130
2020
1,181
2021
1,314
2022
1,208
2023
1,315
2024
1,757
2025
2,371
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 369 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Global Environmental Change34 papers
Environmental Science & Policy12 papers
Climate Policy11 papers
Climatic Change11 papers
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability9 papers
Nature Climate Change9 papers
Sustainability8 papers
Climate Risk Management7 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Farmers and rural livelihoods
("climate change adaptation" OR "adaptation to climate change" OR "adaptation strateg*") AND (farmer* OR smallholder* OR agricultur* OR pastoral*) AND (determinant* OR barrier* OR perception*)
Cities and infrastructure
("climate adaptation" OR "climate change adaptation" OR "urban resilience") AND (city OR cities OR urban) AND (planning OR "nature-based solution*" OR flood* OR heat)
Concepts
("adaptive capacity" OR "limits to adaptation" OR "transformational adaptation" OR maladaptation) AND "climate change"
Explore climate change adaptation in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Adaptive capacity and psychology
Grothmann and Patt (2005) on human cognition and the process of individual adaptation.
Adger (2003) connects adaptation to social capital and collective action.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Successful adaptation to climate change across scales” (2005), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Adger, W. N., Arnell, N. W., & Tompkins, E. L. (2005). Successful adaptation to climate change across scales. Global Environmental Change, 15(2), 77–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2004.12.005
MLA 9th edition
Adger, W. Neil, et al. “Successful Adaptation to Climate Change across Scales.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 77–86, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2004.12.005.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between adaptation and mitigation?
Mitigation reduces the causes of climate change, mainly greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation adjusts human and natural systems to its effects. Some papers on this page address both: Seddon (2022) on nature-based solutions and Suman (2021), a brief review of renewable energy technologies from Nepal.
Where are the IPCC reports?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports, particularly the Working Group II volumes on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, are the authoritative syntheses. They are reports, so they do not appear in this list of works with DOIs drawn from a title search, and you should find and cite them directly at ipcc.ch.
How much adaptation is actually happening?
The listed paper written to answer that is Berrang-Ford et al. (2021), a systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation in Nature Climate Change with 126 authors. Start there. Williams et al. (2021) review the feasibility of adaptation options across Africa.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("climate change adaptation" OR "adaptation to climate change" OR "climate adaptation" OR "adapting to climate change"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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