Transformational Adaptation
In October 2025, Tristan Schultz, along with co-authors Nicole Baker, Amelia Tomkins and Luke Sarsons presented and facilitated two complementary sessions at the Adaptation Futures Conference 2025 at the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand (13–16 October).
Together, the paper presentation and hands-on workshop explored how transformational climate adaptation can be enabled through designed, relational and participatory practices.
Across both sessions, we worked to bridge research and practice—moving beyond adaptation as incremental response, and toward adaptation as cultural, systemic and personal transformation.
Enabling transformational adaptation through designed transformative practices
Our paper presentation shared research from a landscape-scale coastal region in Victoria, Australia, where we examined how people develop the capacity to engage with transformational change. We argued that while climate impacts demand transformation, many adaptation processes remain locked into approaches that reinforce existing systems rather than challenge them.
Drawing on our collective expertise, we presented a framework of designed transformative practices that combined systems thinking, futures thinking and Indigenous ways of knowing. The work, Transformational Approaches to Transformational Adaptation in the Bellarine, used large-scale spatial mapping, temporal systems mapping and yarning circles to support deep listening, collective sensemaking and relationship building.
The findings showed that transformation emerged not only through new strategies or ideas, but through expanded systems understanding, greater comfort with uncertainty, increased agency and hope, and strengthened trust between participants. Importantly, we observed that practitioners and researchers themselves experienced personal transformation through the process—highlighting the critical role of skilled facilitation and learning-oriented design in enabling long-term change.
Building capacities for transformational climate adaptation: a hands-on workshop
The interactive workshop translated these ideas into an embodied, shared experience. Participants were invited to explore their own visions of transformational adaptation using visual prompts, collaborative mapping and speculative storytelling.
Working in small groups, participants moved through cycles of deep thinking, dialogue and collective sensemaking. Using image cards and practice cards, they articulated shared visions of what transformational adaptation could look like, and explored the kinds of practices that might enable people to make transformative decisions within complex social–ecological systems.
The workshop drew on methods such as talking circles, systems and futures mapping, and collaborative futures storytelling. In this short workshop setting, these practices offered a vignette of ways we can create space for reflection, creativity and connection, allowing participants to engage both intellectually and emotionally with the challenges and possibilities of transformational climate adaptation.
Reflections
Together, the paper and workshop reinforced a shared insight: transformational adaptation is not only about new infrastructure, technologies or policies, but about cultivating the capacities, relationships and imaginaries that make systemic change possible. Designed transformative practices can act as critical infrastructure for this work—supporting people to navigate complexity, uncertainty and difference while holding space for hope and agency.
These sessions contributed to an ongoing conversation about how adaptation practice might better integrate critical design, care and futures thinking, particularly in contexts where climate change intersects with justice, place and intergenerational responsibility.
Watch the presentation and workshop: password ‘adaptation25’
