Abstract
The article addresses the nature and challenge of adaptation in the context of global
climate change. The complexity of ‘climate change’ as threat, environmental stressor, risk
domain, and impacting processes with dramatic environmental and human consequences
requires a synthesis of perspectives and models from diverse areas of psychology to
adequately communicate and explain how a more psychological framing of the ‘human
dimensions of global environmental change’ can greatly inform and enhance effective and
collaborative climate change adaptation and mitigation policies and research. An integrative
framework is provided which identifies and considers important mediating and moderating
parameters and processes relating to climate change adaptation, with particular emphasis
given to environmental stress and stress and coping perspectives. This psychological
perspective on climate change adaptation highlights crucial but neglected aspects of
adaptation in the climate change science arena. Of particular importance are intra-individual
and social psychological adaptation processes which powerfully mediate public risk
perceptions and understandings, effective coping responses and resilience, overt behavioral
adjustment and change, and psychological and social impacts. This psychological window on
climate change adaptation is arguably indispensable to genuinely multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary research and policy initiatives addressing the impacts of climate change.
Keywords: Climate change, psychological adaptation, environmental stress, stress a