Special issue: Exploring global and transnational governance of climate change adaptation

In post-Paris climate governance, the old mantra that ‘mitigation is global; adaptation is local’ (see Burton 2011, p. 481) is questioned with increased urgency. A highly localized, place-based approach to accelerating adaptation action seems insufficient. This raises the question: is more global and transnational governance adaptation required, and is it emerging? It is the aim of this Special Issue to provide conceptual approaches and empirical research to respond to these questions and to stimulate a broader academic debate. Adaptation as an inevitable response to climate change became all the more clear with the evidence presented in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. Compared with the previous IPCC Assessment Report in 2014, the level of risk associated with a 2 °C warming had increased for four out of five ‘reasons for concern’ (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018). Yet, limits to adaptive capacity are identified already at 1.5 °C warming and become more pronounced with higher levels of warming. Overall, adaptation efforts worldwide need to accelerate and deepen, and international cooperation is found to be a ‘critical enabler’ (IPCC 2018, p. 25). As part of the general adaptation effort, an increasing number of voices are arguing that greater attention is needed to understand and assess transboundary, regional and global climate impacts, or ‘borderless climate risks’ (see, for example, Khan 2013; Magnan and Ribera 2016; Challinor et al. 2017). Known transboundary resource problems can intensify with climate change, such as water scarcity and quality in shared river basins. Novel and uncertain global systemic risks, induced by climate change, may cascade through the international system, such as food insecurity and price shocks; population displacement and migration; shifts in fish stocks through changing species range; and disruption in global supply chains through climate risk to critical chokepoints. Evidence suggests that vulnerability to these kinds of risk may well be high in places that are also vulnerable to direct and local climate impacts (Hedlund et al. 2018), which could mean further inequality in how costs and benefits of climate change are distributed across the world. A more ‘global’ conception of climate change adaptation is also articulated in international climate governance. The 2015 Paris Agreement explicitly defined adaptation as ‘a global challenge faced by all with local, sub-national, national, regional and internatio