Adaptation Beyond Climate: Facing Planetary Limits and Ecological Injustices

Dear Colleagues,

Adaptation has long been recognized as a key strategy for coping with climate change. Yet the current planetary condition—marked by biodiversity loss, chemical and light pollution, soil degradation, and the erosion of human–nature relations—calls for a broader understanding of what it means to adapt.

This Special Issue aims to explore “planetary adaptation” as a critical framework for analyzing how societies, institutions, and ecosystems respond to interconnected environmental disruptions. Adaptation, in this sense, is not only a technical adjustment but also a social, political, and cultural process that reveals deep asymmetries of power, knowledge, and justice. The purpose of this call is to contribute to a better understanding of how climate change adaptation strategies are evolving, to provide a more accurate account of what is happening at both the local and global levels. Finally, we believe that the adaptation problem needs to be investigated from multiple perspectives and epistemologies, integrating where possible social and biophysical sciences.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue by investigating successful and failed adaptation pathways (maladaptations), questioning whose interests are served and which futures are imagined. Possible topics include adaptation to biodiversity loss, pollution, urban and multispecies adaptation, governance under planetary boundaries, and the emergence of new ethics and epistemologies for living with change. By extending the notion of adaptation beyond climate change, this Special Issue seeks to initiate a transdisciplinary dialogue on the politics, strategies, and hopes for survival within a damaged planet.

In this Special Issue, original research and theoretical articles are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Theory of change and adaptation;
• The dialectics between mitigation and adaptation;
• Adaptation beyond climate: biodiversity loss, pollution, and soil degradation;
• The return to planning as a form of adaptation;
• Racialized forms of social adaptation;
• Migrations as adaptation;
• Adaptation governance and policy under planetary boundaries;
• Vulnerability and resilience;
• Critical approach to market-based adaptation—insurance, incentives, compensations;
• Potentiality and limits of resilience;
• Maladaptation and ecological injustices;
• Indigenous and local knowledges for climate adaptation;
• Agroecology and climate adaptations;
• Agronomic knowledges challenge to save and improve food production;
• Urban and rural forms of adaptation;
• Temporalities of adaptation: urgency, delay, and intergenerational justice concerns;
• Commons and commoning as adaptation strategies;
• Technological fixes vs. transformative collective action and socio-political transformation;
• Art, narratives, and imaginaries of planetary adaptation;
• Adaptation and the political economy of green extractivism.

Dr. Dario Padovan
Dr. Osman Arrobbio
Dr. Andrea Taffuri
Guest Editors

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