In human systems, climate change adaptation is the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities (IPCC Special Report 1.5C). There are various types of adaptation:

• Adaptation limits. The point at which an actor’s objectives (or system needs) cannot be secured from intolerable risks through adaptive actions.
  • Hard adaptation limit: No adaptive actions are possible to avoid intolerable risks.
  • Soft adaptation limit: Options may exist but are currently not available to avoid intolerable risks through adaptive action.
• Adaptation pathways. Planning approaches that focus on the sequence of events over time and the tipping points necessary to shift paths. Dynamic adaptation pathways policy pathways (DAPP) is a specific pathway approach.
• Anticipatory adaptation: Adaptation that takes place before impacts of climate change are observed; occasionally referred as proactive adaptation.
• Autonomous adaptation: Adaptation that does not constitute a conscious response to climate stimuli but is triggered by ecological changes in natural systems and by market or welfare changes in human systems.
• Ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA). The use of ecosystem management activities to increase the resilience and reduce the vulnerability of people and ecosystems to climate change.
• Evolutionary adaptation. The process whereby a species of population becomes better able to live in a changing environment, through the selection of heritable traits. Biologist usually distinguish evolutionary adaptation from acclimatization with the latter occurring within an organism’s lifetime.
• Incremental adaptation. Adaptation that maintains the essence and integrity of a system or process at a given scale. In some case, incremental adaptation can accrue to result in transformational adaptation. Incremental adaptation to change in climate are understood as extensions of actions and behavior that already reduce the losses or enhance the benefits of natural variations in extreme weather/ climate events.
• Options. The array of strategic and measures that are available and appropriate for addressing adaptation. They include a wide range of actions that can be categorized as structural, institutional, ecological or behavioral.
• Planned adaptation: Adaptation that is the result of deliberate policy decision, based on an awareness that conditions have changed or about to change and that action is required to return to, maintain, or achieve a desired state.
• Transformational adaptation. Adaptation that changes the fundamental attributes of a social-ecological system in anticipation of climate change and its impacts; and adaptation response that will be required in the face of a global failure to mitigate the causes of anthropogenic climate change and are characterized by system-wide change or changes across more than one system, by a focus on the future and long-term change, or by direct questioning of the effectiveness of existing systems, social injustices and power imbalances.