Adapting to Climate Change in the United States: What and How Are We Learning from Each Other?

Abstract

Climate adaptation convenings have emerged in the last decade to share knowledge and accelerate learning in the field. Convenings provide a wealth of information for understanding what issues are being researched and addressed, for evaluating what practices and key components of convenings are considered particularly valuable to practitioners, and for understanding where there are gaps in our knowledge or trends in learning that should be supported. We analyzed survey and attendance data from online and in-person climate convenings in the U.S. to assess perceived outcomes and future intentions, as well as explored thematic changes in sessions at in-person conferences. We performed descriptive analyses on survey and attendance data and conducted thematic analysis of sessions at in-person conferences. Both online and in-person formats achieved high levels of learning and satisfaction reported by respondents, but with higher connectivity and relationship building at in-person events. Topics addressed in forums showed small but meaningful shifts, as some areas of interest increased (e.g., social justice, nature-based solutions) while others decreased (e.g., decision-making tools, infrastructure) or showed variable responses. These trends and feedback provide a foundation for continuing to grow effective practices to support climate adaptation practitioners with the knowledge and opportunities for connection needed to advance the adaptation field.

1. Introduction

Communities across the U.S. are facing the growing, complex challenge of adapting to the impacts of climate change [1]. Despite ongoing global efforts to mitigate climate change through greenhouse gas emissions reductions, historical and ongoing emissions are driving impacts to social, environmental and economic systems, and adaptation actions to respond to these emerging threats are among the greatest critical needs of the 21st century [2]. There is no playbook for how to adapt; in many cases, communities face threats from a diversity of climate changes that present complex technical, political, and social challenges and require innovative solutions [3].

In the past decade, climate adaptation convenings have emerged as ways to exchange knowledge and accelerate learning among scientists, government officials, community activists, and other stakeholders who want to learn from each other and advance the field of climate change adaptation [4]. These convenings can take many forms, including professional conferences, workshops, and online webinars. They can range in size from fewer than a dozen people (e.g., local community or jurisdictional workshops) to many hundreds, such as the National Adaptation Forum (Forum), a bi-annual conference focused on climate change adaptation. The Forum is the largest convening of adaptation practitioners in the U.S., is the only national convening of its type and breadth of topics and is the focus of this paper’s research.

Convenings offer some distinct advantages relative to other forms of climate change adaptation education, including learning about emerging approaches and actions that may not yet be in the published literature; the opportunity to engage in deeper discussion to learn more; and networking opportunities to meet, discuss, and pursue ideas and solutions with fellow practitioners [5,6,7]. However, while post-conference feedback is used to inform future convenings within a conference lineage, it is under-researched as a way to understand learning outcomes and trends across the field [8].

Adaptation convenings also provide a wealth of information for understanding what issues are being prioritized and explored by adaptation practitioners, as well as where gaps may exist. However, we have not found other research that has examined long-term trends in adaptation topics and how these trends reflect shifts in strategies and priorities across the field of practice. These convenings also offer opportunities to evaluate what practices and key components are considered valuable by practitioners in supporting their work, so that we can amplify and share these lessons to accelerate effective learning [5,7,9,10].

Convenings over the past several years were additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic [11]. As governments and institutions shut down and pivoted to online formats, the climate change adaptation field, as well as many other fields, saw a rapid growth in the number and variety of online convenings to help fill the gap in opportunities for learning and growth [9,12]. The limited research available from this transformative time period suggests that most people learned a similar amount at online convenings compared with the in-person version of these events, but online meetings reduced opportunities, or at least the perception of these opportunities, for things like capacity building and networking [6]. These tradeoffs continue to be a rich area for exploration [13] to better understand how to reap the benefits of in-person and on-line platforms while minimizing their downsides, with creative opportunities for blending lessons learned from multiple formats to accelerate learning about adaptation.

In this paper, we seek to explore these areas through an evaluation of ten years of data from the Forum, asking these research questions:

• How has the content shared at climate adaptation convenings changed over time?
• How do learning outcomes compare between online and in-person climate convenings?
• How have lessons learned from on-line convenings been applied to post-pandemic regional/national adaptation forums, and what opportunities remain?

2. Materials and Methods

To evaluate our research questions regarding topical trends and learning outcomes in climate convenings, we used registration, attendance, programmatic, and survey data from multiple online and in-person events associated with the Forum. The Forum is a climate adaptation-focused conference that aims to propel climate adaptation action forward by highlighting the breadth of adaptation activities occurring around the world, with an explicit focus on the United States [14]. The conference was created by professionals in the adaptation community who recognized that adaptation was often sidelined at climate conferences and felt the topic deserved its own platform. This national-level event brings together hundreds of climate change adaptation practitioners across a wide variety of public and private institutions for a scientific meeting that includes plenaries, invited and organized sessions, and poster sessions. The Forum has hosted a national, in-person convening every other year since 2013, except for the longer gap between 2019 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topical data was used in this research from six in-person convenings and attendee surveys from the two most recent in-person Forums (2022 and 2024) (

Table 1. Timing, topics, and datasets used from National Adaptation Forum online and in-person events.

Series Timing	Title (Online) or Location (In-Person)	Data Used in This Research
Online series
October–November 2021	Tribal and Indigenous Climate Adaptation	Survey Attendance Sector affiliation
March–April 2022	Monitoring and Evaluation of Adaptation Progress and Successes	Survey Attendance
April–May 2023	Responding to Climate-Amplified Extreme Weather Events	Survey Attendance Sector Affiliation
In-person forums
April 2013	Denver, CO, USA	Presentation topics
May 2015	St. Louis, MO, USA	Presentation topics
May 2017	St. Paul, MN, USA	Presentation topics
April 2019	Madison, WI, USA	Presentation topics Attendance
October 2022	Baltimore, MD, USA	Survey Presentation topics Sector affiliation Attendance
May 2024	St. Paul, MN, USA	Survey Presentation topics Sector affiliation Attendance

; and see Section 2.1 for details).

Between 2021 and 2023, the Forum also hosted three online series across a wide variety of climate change adaptation topics (Table 1). The online format was spurred by public health conditions and the need to avoid large in-person gatherings but have continued to provide space to gather and learn in between in-person forums. Topics for online series were identified by Forum committee members and funders as adaptation topics of interest. All three series followed the same format, with four individual 1.5 h sessions led by a panel of speakers that were held every other week over the course of the series.

2.1. National Adaptation Forum Survey Data

In this study, we draw on survey data collected directly after each online series that took place between October 2021 and May 2023, as well as post-convening survey data from two in-person Forum annual meetings that occurred in 2022 and 2024. We excluded survey data from in-person convenings prior to 2022 because the questions posed were not comparable with the survey questions from the online convenings. Following the in-person conferences and last session of each online series, an online survey was sent to all attendees using either SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. All surveys administered were voluntary, and answers were kept confidential and anonymized; the only identifying information retained for analysis was sectoral affiliation from the 2021 and 2023 series (Table 1). Sectoral affiliation data was not collected for the online 2022 series.

Survey questions were designed to provide information about participant outcomes, which included what participants learned or otherwise took away from the event, as well as future intentions. Surveys included a mix of Likert-type scale items and open-ended questions that were similarly designed across the in-person and online events to allow for comparison of outcomes and post-event intentions (see Appendix A for list of questions and specific wording for each event). Surveys included questions about attendees’ race and ethnicity, years spent working in the field of climate adaptation, and, in all but the 2022 online series (see above), employment sector. Participant outcomes were conceptualized using Wenger and colleagues’ definitions of immediate and potential values [15], as well drawing upon prior research on the outcomes of climate adaptation convenings and other similar workshops [6]. Questions asked about participants’ level of agreement regarding measures of enjoyment, knowledge gained, connections made, and action orientation (intentions to act). Survey items tracking participant demographics and measuring outcomes were consistent across all convenings.

For each survey question, percent response rates were calculated for the number of respondents in a specific category (e.g., “Strongly Agree”) for all online events and in-person events. To assess positive event outcomes, we enumerated where individuals Strongly Agreed or Agreed with given statements.

2.2. National Adaptation Forum Attendance Data

We collected registration data from all online convenings to enumerate attendance (Table 1). Registrants were asked to indicate the sector they worked in (e.g., government, private, academic, non-profit), and pre-event registration data was cross-checked with attendance records to determine the sectoral breakdown of attendees.

Attendance counts were collected for every session at the 2019, 2022 and 2024 Forum events to assess which sessions and topics were of interest to participants (Table 1). For each event, the highest-attended sessions were counted and then analyzed based on associated topic areas to identify topics that evoked significant interest in participants (see Section 2.3).

2.3. National Adaptation Forum Topic Data

For each in-person Forum event, individuals were asked to submit session abstracts through an open, formal Call for Proposal process. For each session, speakers were asked to select topic areas that aligned with their presentation. This list of topic areas that speakers choose from is compiled by Forum committee members with the goal of capturing the breadth of activities taking place across the field of climate change adaptation (

Table 2. Topic areas from the Forum Call for Proposals (listed in alphabetical order; 38 total).

Topic Areas
Agriculture and Food Security	Insurance and Risk Management
Art, Storytelling, and Movement	International Perspectives
Biodiversity, Ecosystems, and Natural Resources	Land Use Planning
Built Environment	Local Capacity Building
Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Intersection	Monitoring, Evaluation, and Adaptive Management
Climate Displacement, Migration, and Gentrification	Nature-Based Solutions (NbS)
Climate Grief and Anxiety	Network Building
Climate Justice and Equity	Policy Solutions for Adaptation
Communications and Stakeholder Engagement	Politics of Climate Change Adaptation
Decision-making Tools and Technology	Public and Private Sector Partnerships
Economics, Workforce Development, and Green Jobs	Public Health: Environmental, Physical, Behavioral, and Mental
Energy Solutions	Research and Science of Adaptation
Extreme Events, Emergency Management, and Natural Hazard Mitigation Planning	Rural and Island Communities
Faith-Focused Adaptation	Social Resilience and Transformation
Financing Adaptation	Sustainability
Floodplain Management	Transportation
Hazardous Waste and Remediation	Tribal and Indigenous Perspectives
Implementation of Adaptation	Water Resources
Infrastructure	Youth Engagement and Education

). For the five Forum events that were held between 2013 and 2022, speakers were able to select as many topic areas as they wanted. In 2024, speakers were limited to two topic areas per submission. A few categories, including “climate grief and anxiety” and “floodplain management” were only added in more recent convenings; in retrospective analysis of the data, we assigned topics to proposals that did not have the newer category options if they applied. If speakers did not self-identify topic areas, we reviewed abstract text and assigned corresponding topics from the list. We analyzed the chosen topic areas of abstracts included in the final program across all six previous Forum events to evaluate trends in the field of climate change adaptation over time.

For each event, more than 80 committee members were involved with the review and selection from hundreds of submissions based on a standardized set of criteria that includes prioritizing relevance to the climate adaptation field, diversity of topics, and centering equity (Appendix D). This research only considers accepted sessions that were included in the final program. To combat potential biases of reviewers, significant effort was put into the committee recruitment process to ensure members represented a wide variety of sectors (all levels of government, private industry, academia, non-profit), career stages, and topical expertise. Following initial committee recruitment, gaps in sectors and topical expertise were identified and additional committee members were recruited to fill those gaps. This range of expertise, paired with an explicit focus on topical diversity, in addition to members following a common set of criteria (Appendix D), helped to mitigate potential selection bias that may have come from committee members.

3. Results

3.1. National Adaptation Forum Survey and Attendance Data

Below, we share the findings from our descriptive analyses of attendance data, sectoral participation, survey response rates, and participants’ responses about outcomes for three online series and two in-person Forum events.

3.1.1. Survey Response Rates and Sectoral Attendance Data

The online Monitoring and Evaluation of Adaptation Progress and Successes Series had 374 total attendees and 31 post-series survey responses, a response rate of 8%; attendee sector data was not collected for this online series so that information is not included in

Table 3. Sectoral breakdown and survey response rates for online and in-person Forum events. Sector data was not collected for the Monitoring and Evaluation series. Government represents municipal, county, state, federal, and tribal governments. Community Group was not an option for registrants at the 2022 and 2024 Events. 2022 attendees also did not have the option to choose “Other/Unaffiliated”. nd = no data.

	Online Series			In-Person Events
	Tribal Adaptation	Monitoring and Evaluation	Extreme Weather	2022 National Adaptation Forum	2024 National Adaptation Forum
Attending/Responded	785/50	374/31	864/36	838/302	1095/355
Percent responded	6%	8%	4%	36%	32%
Sector
Government	44%	nd	53%	32%	37%
Non-Profit	23%	nd	16%	34%	25%
University	15%	nd	17%	14%	16%
Corporate/For-Profit	9%	nd	8%	15%	16%
Community Group	1%	nd	0.5%	nd	nd
Student/Fellow	3%	nd	2%	5%	4%
Unaffiliated/Other	6%	nd	3.5%	nd	4%

. Response rates for the online events ranged from 4 to 8%, while about a third of attendees from the two in-person forums participated in the surveys (Table 3).

The sectoral distribution of attendees at both online and in-person events was similar; a few differences include a higher percentage of attendees from governmental sectors at online series, and higher percentages of attendees from nonprofits and for-profit businesses at in-person events (Table 3).

3.1.2. Survey Results

Respondents’ opinions related to learning outcomes differed between on-line and in-person events (Figure 1). In-person events had more respondents who agreed with the statements “I had meaningful interactions with other people”, “I enjoyed participating”, and “I made new connections.” Both in-person and online events had high proportions of respondents who agreed with the statement “I acquired new knowledge.” Overall ratings of the event as above average or excellent for both in-person and online events were high, around 88%.

In-person events had a higher percentage of respondents agree with the statement “I intend to implement an idea or suggestion from this series” (Figure 2). The degree to which respondents agreed they intended to collaborate with people they met through the event on future climate projects was far higher for respondents of in-person events (84%) compared to online event respondents (32%). Outcomes were very similar (within a few percentage points) for the level of agreement of in-person and online event respondents with the statements “I intend to apply something I learned at the conference in my work”, “I intend to use resources that I was introduced to” and “I intend to attend another climate conference”.

3.2. National Adaptation Forum Trends in Topics

Speakers had 38 topic areas to choose from when submitting an abstract; as a result, no single topic area dominates the program, but there were differences in topic frequency both within and across forums (Figure 3, see also Appendix B for a detailed breakdown of trends in topics over time). About a third of all the topics were consistently represented in 5% or more of the sessions across all six conferences.

Several topics increased over time. These include: “Climate Justice and Equity” (5.1% increase from 2013 to 2024), “Public Health: Environmental, Physical, Behavioral, and Mental” (3.7% increase from 2013 to 2024), “Local Capacity Building” (2.3% increase from 2013 to 2024), and “Nature-Based Solutions” (2.0% increase from 2013 to 2024). (Appendix B).

In addition, there are a number of topics that decreased from 2013 to 2024. These include: “Biodiversity, Ecosystems, and Natural Resources” (9.2% decrease from 2013 to 2024), “Extreme Events, Emergency Management, and Natural Hazard Mitigation Planning” (3.7% decrease from 2013 to 2024), “Decision-making Tools and Technology” (2.8% decrease from 2013 to 2024), “Network Building” (2.6% decrease from 2013 to 2024), and “Infrastructure” (2.3% decrease from 2013 to 2024) (Appendix B).

Two topics, “Communications and Stakeholder Engagement” and “Tribal and Indigenous Perspectives” reached their highest proportion within the program in 2019 and 2017, respectively, and then declined in following forums. Other topics saw similar trends of increases in 2015 to 2019 and then decreases from 2022 to 2024, but at a smaller magnitude (Figure 3).

Fourteen topic areas consistently made up less than 2.5% of sessions from 2013 to 2024 (Appendix C). “Youth Engagement and Education” and “Climate Grief and Anxiety” were not represented in the program until 2017 but have progressively increased each year and made up 2.2% and 0.7% of the program in 2024, respectively.

Twenty-eight topics were represented at the 2019, 2022, and 2024 Forum events. Of these, about a dozen topics were especially well attended (Figure 4). Collectively over the three most recent forums, more than 40% of attendees participated in climate justice and equity topics; and over 20% of participants participated in Communications and Engagement; Extreme Events; or Decision-Making tools.

4. Discussion

4.1. Benefits of In-Person vs. Online Interactions

Keeping the limitations of our data in mind (See Section Limitations of Survey Results), in-person and online events both had high rates of overall satisfaction from respondents. Online and in-person events were similar in outcomes relating to learning new information and skills and intention to use the resources that were shared during these events. These findings are consistent with other work that has found high levels of knowledge attainment and application of gained knowledge in both virtual and in-person settings [6,16,17]. In-person event participants were also more likely to indicate that they intended to apply content or implement ideas learned at the event to their work; however, the difference between in-person and online events was less pronounced than networking outcomes, indicating that both avenues can result in the intention to apply content post-event.

The most notable differences between online and in-person events in our analyses were participants’ higher rates of acknowledging making connections, having meaningful interactions, and intention to collaborate with individuals they met at in-person events. These findings are consistent with other research comparing in-person and online events [6,13], supporting that respondents see significant value in the networking opportunities afforded by in-person events, and speaks to an important reason why people are willing to make the investment to meet in person. This finding also prompts us to raise the question of whether there are ways to more intentionally create networking opportunities in online events. Tools that might be explored for this type of additionality include: ice-breaker questions that help people learn more about others’ work and areas of interest; breakout rooms; using algorithmic matching of attendees to facilitate virtual meetings more likely to result in productive networking opportunities [18]. Recent innovations in technologies that provide a more robust, seamless and interactive experience—such as the ability to search and tag network connections, and opportunities to engage in written and face-to-face conversation in real time in association with speaker and poster sessions—are increasingly within reach and have been shown to improve user experience and engagement [19,20]. Increasingly, particularly after the pandemic, attention is being paid to ways to make online platforms more inclusive and dynamic, which could help mitigate this gap in opportunities to make more meaningful connections in online settings [13,21,22].

Limitations of Survey Results

Our survey response rates varied and were much lower for online than in-person events. A non-response bias in this dataset may skew the outcomes. Therefore, we must be cautious in assigning substantial weight to the outcomes of on-line survey results that represent a minority (<10%) of attendees. These lower rates of response are themselves an interesting outcome, suggesting a lower rate of engagement by online attendees who may not have been as motivated or inspired by the online content and thus were less likely to respond, about which we can only conjecture. There is also obviously asymmetry in asking questions of attendees of a single event versus a more complex, multi-session conference with many topics that creates different types of learning experiences. We recognize that these caveats may limit the generalizability of our findings; however, as one of the largest US convenings in this space, we believe the Forum data holds relevant insights for the field of climate adaptation as a whole.

4.2. Where the Field Is Headed According to Topical Trends

In looking at Forum in-person conferences, we identified changes in the frequency of certain topics over time, including increasing representation of topics including Climate Justice and Equity, Local Capacity Building, Nature-based Solutions, and Public Health, and a decrease in others including Biodiversity, Infrastructure, and Extreme Events, among others. Most of these trends were relatively small (from 2 to 5% over the 10 years of forums), but they may reflect some broader trends in the field of climate adaptation.

Increased focus on climate justice and equity in recent conferences, which was also reflected in high attendance data at the last three Forums, aligns with increasing attention to these topics in federal and local climate planning (e.g., Justice 40) [23,24] and climate adaptation research [25,26,27]. We specifically saw a significant increase in representation of this topic at the 2022 Forum. There has also been an increasing recognition of how public health and climate change intersect, and particularly in how public health agencies can play a powerful role in climate change adaptation [28,29,30]. The increase in Nature-Based Solutions presentations at Forums reflects a broader acceleration of research, implementation and policy development for this topic [31,32,33,34,35].

Some topics decreased in representation in these conferences over time, including Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Natural Resources; Decision-making Tools and Technology; Extreme Events; Infrastructure; and Network Building. Some of the decrease in Biodiversity as a topic area may be due to a shift in related topics, such as Nature-based Solutions, as discussed above, particularly at the most recent Forum in 2024. While we do not expect there is a lack of interest in biodiversity and natural systems, we note the preponderance in NAF conferences of human infrastructure and sociopolitical topics; it may be that natural system topics (with the notable exception of Nature-based Solutions which grew in popularity) are being covered in other convenings, while the Forum increasingly has more of a human-systems approach. For fields like Infrastructure and Extreme Events, these are topic areas that, when the field of adaptation was younger, would have been easier to silo or separate. As the field has grown, it is more likely that these topics have become integrated into broader approaches or topic areas. The last of these topics, Network Building, can intersect with the topic of Capacity Building, a topic area that has grown and perhaps has already subsumed some of the previously labeled Network Building content.

We note an increase followed by a more recent decrease in Tribal and Indigenous Perspectives; this may be due to a decrease in outreach to tribal groups in 2022 and 2024 that related primarily to organizer capacity to sustain targeted outreach efforts (C. Schafer, pers. obs.). We also note that the National Tribal & Indigenous Climate Conference (NTICC), which began virtually in 2020 and met in-person in 2022 and 2024, may have provided an additional or alternative venue for this work [36]. In either case, continuing to ensure that tribal voices are heard and integrated into climate change adaptation work speaks to the need for sustained engagement and continuing to find ways to facilitate the participation of historically underrepresented and under-resourced groups.

Finally, we had many topics that have been a consistently a small component of the program over time (Appendix C), and there are many possible reasons for these small showings. Some topics, such as Climate Grief and Anxiety or Youth Engagement, are nascent; the field is just starting to recognize the importance of these topics [37,38,39], but they are showing a small amount of growth There are certain topics that are well-known (e.g., Transportation, Hazardous Waste and Remediation, Floodplain Management, Energy Solutions), but intersection with the field of adaptation is fairly recent, as these topics have existed in silos for many years [25,40,41,42,43]. Other under-represented topics may reflect the lack of diversity within the field, such as participation from rural and Island communities, which may have higher cost and resource barriers to attend national conferences. Our findings could provide some direction for session organizers to highlight underrepresented, yet highly relevant, topics more prominently in future convenings.

5. Conclusions

Climate adaptation is an emerging field. Our analysis of survey, attendance, and topic data from the National Adaptation Forum series highlights opportunities to move the field of climate adaptation forward by supporting what works well, improving learning and networking opportunities, and identifying and addressing where gaps remain in representation of topics in the climate adaptation field. Online and in-person surveys provided evidence that participants gained knowledge about climate adaptation in both formats, and importantly, carry that knowledge forward into their work. Online meetings appeared to have less success in providing networking and collaborative opportunities than in-person, which points to a real value of in-person conferences. However, the cost, accessibility for under-represented groups, and environmental benefits of online forums, as well as their robust growth in a post-pandemic society, supports the importance of using innovative technology in online convenings to increase the effectiveness of networking outcomes.

Our findings also identified several patterns in topics represented at Forum events, some of which may reflect larger societal interests or needs; others may provide opportunities to shift attention to underrepresented topics. These populations and topic areas are important to specifically focus attention and resources for in-person program development to improve the diversity of both topics and presenters. Our research helps us better understand Forum attendees, their interests, and the barriers and facilitating conditions for their participation in ways that can support progress in climate adaptation. This research may be transferable to a wide range of scientific practitioners and conveners to improve participant learning and field-level outcomes.