SSIR | Climate Adaptation Means Building Social Infrastructure

By Tanya Kak, Portfolio Lead – Climate & Environment 

Picture a mangrove at low tide, its roots holding the shoreline together, sifting silt, breaking waves, and making a home for life that most of us will never see. From a distance, it reads as one green band on the horizon; up close, it is an unruly architecture of roots and relationships, constantly adjusting, failing, and regrowing.

In this moment of cascading climate shocks, adaptation looks more like a mangrove than a sea wall built out of concrete: nurturing the capacities, ties, and institutions that allow people and places to bend without breaking. And while communities have always been adapting, adaptation has finally taken center stage in climate politics and philanthropy, in COP communiqués and high‑level dialogues, in the Adaptation Gap Report, and in the rise of dedicated adaptation and resilience funds. Adaptation finance has grown to an estimated $60–70 billion annually, and overall climate flows climb into the trillions, but developing countries will still need well over $300 billion a year for adaptation by the mid‑2030s. Goals to double adaptation finance by 2025 have already slipped out of reach, even as losses mount and the costs of delay increase.

Hazards are accelerating faster than our ability to rearrange exposure and build capacity. And the language of adaptation finance can feel weightless compared to the lived realities that already shape people’s days: who walks further for water, who can afford to stay indoors during a heatwave, who has the savings or networks to recover after a flood. Does adaptation risk becoming a new label for old habits? How can we prevent it from becoming just a category in a portfolio, a pillar in a theory of change, and a theme for convenings?

In short, what would it mean to use the lived fabric of adaptation to reorient strategy for those working at the intersection of climate, development, and social change? What are the social conditions that make some households absorb climate shocks while others break under their weight?

Adaptation comes down to one deceptively simple idea: climate risk is not just about the hazard, it’s about who is exposed to it and what capacities they can draw upon in responding to it. In this sense, there are four interlocking categories of adaptation required:

1. Hazards: heatwaves, floods, cyclones, drought, sea-level rise, and so on.
2. Exposure: where people and assets sit in relation to those hazards.
3. Capacity: the financial, social, institutional, and service systems that help people respond to their exposure to risk.
4. Institutions and rules: land rights, planning norms, governance, and budgets that shape all three.

For example, a week of extreme heat creates entirely different realities depending on how these categories overlap. In a city where outdoor workers labor in unshaded streets during a heatwave (hazard), informal homes trap heat (exposure), overstretched clinics struggle (capacity), while Heat Action Plans (HAPs) represent a policy response (“Institutions and Rules”): in cities with better shade, labor protections, early warnings, and primary health services, the same hazard event will be far less deadly.

The core proposition, then, is that adaptation is less about shrinking the hazard map than redrawing the exposure and capacity maps: moving people and assets out of harm’s way where possible, and thickening the buffers that absorb shocks where that is not possible. Once the problem is seen this way, the supposed trade‑off between “development” and “climate” begins to dissolve. Safe housing, decent work, clean water, and inclusive governance are simultaneously development gains and adaptation investments.

At Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, the key learning questions are: First, how do we see and act on risk as a function of exposure and capacity, not just hazard? Second, how do we move from reactive coping (selling assets, withdrawing children from school, migrating under duress) to proactive, collective adaptation? Third, how do we strengthen social, ecological, and institutional systems so that adaptation becomes muscle memory, part of how societies function, rather than a string of standalone projects?

Beneath the generic headlines, recent research on adaptation and vulnerability throws up some counterintuitive, even uncomfortable insights that push us to ask hard questions about resilience and adaptation:

1. Shelter doesn’t mean “safety.”

Heat policy often imagines danger as something you step out into: sun‑baked streets, work sites, agricultural fields. Yet low‑income tin‑roof or poorly ventilated housing across South Asia and African cities often show indoor temperatures regularly exceeding already extreme outdoor heat, especially at night. For older adults, children, people with chronic illness, and women whose work and care roles keep them at home, “taking shelter” can mean living inside a slow oven, rather than escaping one.

Are adaptation strategies designed around actual exposure patterns, or around assumptions that only make sense if you already have a cool, safe home to retreat to?

2. “Coping” can undermine resilience.

Households don’t respond passively to floods, droughts, or heat, but by doing everything they can: borrowing at high interest, selling livestock or tools, reducing meals, moving children out of school, or sending one family member on risky migration. Research on climate shocks and poverty shows, however, that survival under constraint can often erode future earning power, health, and bargaining strength. This means that, in aggregate, what can be misread as “adaptive capacity,” is actually people trading away long‑term security to get through the season.

When we celebrate resilience, are we recognizing people’s agency or overlooking the structural conditions that leave them with only harmful forms of adaptation available?

3. Maladaption

Classic adaptation responses (sea walls, embankments, air conditioning, irrigation canals) can reduce immediate exposure while creating new dependencies and blind spots. Hard coastal defenses, for example, can undermine mangrove ecosystems that would otherwise provide flexible protection, while energy‑intensive cooling strategies can entrench fossil‑heavy grids.

There is a growing literature on “maladaptation,” interventions that only shift risk in time by postponing problems or space, protecting one area while increasing risk elsewhere. The critical question, therefore, is not simply whether infrastructure reduces losses in one place or time but who, elsewhere or later, must live with the new risks it creates?

Adaptation as Social Infrastructure

Adaptation is not a catalog of climate fixes; it’s a social project about housing, labor, debt, care, and voice. It’s about who has room to choose how they adapt, and who is adapting because there was never really a choice at all. As a result, the most durable forms of adaptation often look less like projects and more like infrastructures of relationship and practice that hold under pressure, or social infrastructure: the networks, norms, and institutions that determine whether people face climate shocks alone or together.

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of social infrastructure:

1. Relational: self‑help groups, cooperatives, neighborhood committees, migrant associations, and informal mutual aid systems. These structures carry information, coordinate evacuations, pool savings, and make it possible to absorb and share risk. 

   For example, through its “mycelium” approach, Asar, a network weaver in India, builds networks across local governments, civil society, communities, and experts. One of their initiatives, Conference of Panchayats (CoP), brings together village panchayats, community-based organizations, SHGs and local governments. In Jharkhand and Maharashtra, CoPs have convened hundreds of Gram Panchayat representatives and community leaders to share lived climate risk, local solutions, and jointly plan adaptation strategies.

2. Cognitive and cultural: local knowledge of landscapes, seasonal patterns, safe routes, and repair skills; shared stories about what has worked in past crises; norms around reciprocity and care. This is the tacit “software” that allows communities to improvise effectively. 

   For example, in the hills of the Nilgiris in India, the Keystone Foundation has for decades worked as a custodian of Indigenous knowledge systems. Through its People & Nature Collectives program, Keystone archives oral histories, ecological memory, traditional land-use practices, foraging knowledge, food cultures, and seasonal calendars—preserving “community intelligence” that otherwise risks vanishing.

3. Institutional: local governments, frontline bureaucracies, public health and education systems, and civic spaces that are capable of listening, deciding, and acting under uncertainty. Their behavior in a crisis often matters as much as physical defenses. 

   For example, Jan Sahas (India) works at the intersection of labor rights, migration governance, and social protection— all critical levers in climate-affected regions where heat stress and climate-linked precarity are reshaping labor markets. Through secure mobility corridors, legal aid, and worker-protection systems for millions of migrant and informal workers, Jan Sahas strengthens the very institutions that determine whether workers can adapt without slipping deeper into vulnerability.

When these infrastructures are thick and healthy, communities can adapt in ways that are more equitable, anticipatory, and sustainable. When they are thin or frayed, even well‑designed technical interventions struggle to land. A flood barrier is only as useful as the governance that decides who can live behind it, the warning systems that signal when it might fail, and the social networks that determine who is helped first.

Treating adaptation as a single new funding silo misses the point, because social infrastructure is as varied as human society. The central question is not “how many adaptation projects are in the portfolio?” but “how strong is the social infrastructure that will carry people through the next decade of shocks?”

A Three‑Dimensional Shift

If adaptation is to live up to its current billing, we must think along three dimensions.

1. Political, not just technical.
Resilience is a political question about representation and control, not a neutral outcome of technology deployment. Adaptation is often framed as an engineering problem: build sea walls, launch early warning systems, pilot drought‑tolerant crops. These efforts matter, but they remain brittle if divorced from power. Real adaptation demands that those most affected are not merely consulted but centered in decision‑making.

2. Development protection, not a separate track.
For many communities, adaptation is synonymous with preserving hard‑won development gains. When rains fail, or floods surge, schools close, health systems buckle, food prices spike, and housing becomes precarious. Well‑designed adaptation investments function as a form of development insurance: they keep children in school, water systems running, clinics open, and families housed despite climate shocks. Treating adaptation and development as separate silos ignores this interdependence. It also risks double-counting: labelling essential social spending as “climate” without changing its design to address risk over time.

3. Long‑term, not project‑bounded.
True resilience is not built in two‑year cycles with pilot‑phase budgets and pre‑set exit strategies. Institutions that learn, infrastructure that is maintained, and communities that trust the systems around them all take time to grow. Short grants and discrete projects can spark innovation, but they rarely sustain it. Adaptation requires persistent, patient investment: in planning and maintenance, in local leadership, in the capacity to monitor, evaluate, and iterate under changing conditions.

Adaptation Ambitions: Reimagined

Taken together, these three shifts suggest that the heart of adaptation lies less in the novelty of interventions and more in the durability and fairness of the systems in which they are embedded.

The current surge of interest in adaptation offers a rare chance to reset the field’s ambitions. Rather than aspiring to “climate‑proof” societies (an impossibility in a world already transformed), it invites a more grounded goal: to cultivate social infrastructures that allow people to navigate uncertainty with agency, solidarity, and some measure of security.

This is quieter than many slogans, but also more radical. It asks for institutions that are willing to share power, not just funds; for metrics that can hold complexity, not just count outputs; and for strategies that honor the improvisations communities are already making, instead of treating them as footnotes to formal plans.

First Published in Stanford Social Innovation Review