Framing time: How temporalities shape climate change adaptation

Climate change adaptation is not just a technical or environmental challenge, but a temporal one, involving notions of urgency, delay, anticipation, and historical embedding. This article explores the intersection of adaptation and temporality, arguing that the communication, politics and practices of adapting to climate change are fundamentally shaped by divergent understandings and experiences of time. It reviews the empirical adaptation literature – social science, natural science, and humanities – and conducts a framing analysis. While the literature often foregrounds dualistic clashes between policymakers’ long-term and citizens’ short-term perspectives, our results suggest a much richer temporal repertoire. Eight distinct temporal framings were found: climate futures, everyday climate temporality, embedded and embodied climate change, seasonality, climate emergencies & apocalypses, temporalities of the unknown, more-than-human temporalities, and deep time. Communities used formats and objects such as film, art, traditional calendars and landscape features, as well as place-based emotions such as feeling part of a community or sense of belonging, to make different ideas of time meaningful. These strengthen people's ability to act and imagine better futures. In landscapes and cityscapes, multiple temporalities intersect, harmonise or clash, and political struggles take place over whose futures are prioritised or marginalised, shaped by social relations and power dynamics. We argue that climate risk management and adaptation should look beyond linear, technocratic perspectives, and include cyclical, relational, and embedded understandings. Timely adaptation requires temporal awareness and pluralism: accommodating multiple temporalities, and acknowledging the diverse ways communities understand and inhabit time in a changing world.