Climate change adaptation technology development of key socioeconomic sectors and ecosystem in China

Adaptation technology plays a crucial role in achieving adaptation goals, but its development remains disorganised and unsystematic. To efficiently support the implementation of adaptation actions, fostering innovation in adaptation technology is urgently needed. In this study, adaptation technologies were firstly collected from China’s four National Assessment Reports on Climate Change to create a technology list. The adaptation technologies were then categorised into four components: reducing climatic hazards, diminishing exposure, decreasing vulnerability and increasing adaptation capacity. These technologies were further applied to sectors such as agriculture, ecosystem, water resources, human health and energy. Comparison results of the archived adaptation technologies in the four National Assessment Reports, with the development targets outlined in China’s Special Science & Technology Plan on Climate Change, revealed that while adaptation technologies have been enriched in China, substantial gaps remain. These gaps arise from an imbalance in the development of adaptation technologies across different socioeconomic sectors, a lack of integration of these technologies into a systematic package and weak linkages between the attributes of adaptation technologies and climate risk levels. We propose that the adaptation technology system should be developed based on the theoretical mechanisms of adaptation, with the main goal of efficiently reducing climate risk. The framework for the adaptation technology system should be comprehensive, considering the synergy between adaptation and mitigation. The framework should also be constructed with logical layers that address opportunities and dangers from climate change across multiple spatiotemporal scales, while capturing the nexus between various sectors. Incremental and transformational adaptation should be considered as two basic categories of the adaptation technology system, each corresponding to different climate risk levels.