Strategic resilience: outlining a new government approach to climate change adaptation

The authors propose a 'strategic resilience' framework to elevate climate change adaptation from 'low politics' in environment ministries to the heart of government. Using a UK case study, the paper highlights the failure of traditional territorial adaptation to address cross-border risks—which propagate via trade, finance, people, and biophysical routes. It warns against the 'securitization' of adaptation by defence ministries and suggests three pathways for reform: empowering environment ministries, establishing central coordinators, or creating dedicated ministries of resilience.

• The authors define "strategic resilience" as the capacity of a government to withstand and recover from multiple, complex shocks while pursuing coherent, strategic national objectives, specifically including the management of cross-border and cascading climate change impacts.
• Traditional climate change adaptation has relied on a "territorial framing" that focuses on impacts within a country's borders, largely because the brief is typically assigned to environment ministries that govern local systems like coasts and agriculture.
• Cross-border climate change impacts—which require adaptation in one country due to initial impacts in another—are assessed as being "orders of magnitude" greater than direct climate impacts and propagate through four pathways: trade, finance, people, and biophysical routes.
• The authors warn against a "securitization" approach to adaptation led by defence ministries, arguing that military planners' tendency to view the world through zero-sum outcomes and allies versus enemies could lead to less collaborative policies and less effective global resilience investments.
• A case study of the UK reveals that while the government has identified cross-border risks for over 12 years, adaptation governance has remained largely static within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), leading to slow progress and a lack of priority at strategic levels.
• The UK has recently experimented with a "risk ownership" model in its Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3), assigning specific cross-border risks to various departments, such as the Department for Business and Trade for supply chains and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for human mobility.
• The UK has attempted to elevate adaptation by creating a Climate Resilience Board co-chaired by the Cabinet Office and Defra, and by aligning the National Adaptation Programme with the broader UK Government Resilience Framework.
• The authors propose three potential pathways for evolving adaptation governance: granting environment ministries more power to hold other actors accountable, establishing national coordinators at the centre of government, or creating national ministries of resilience.

APA

Benzie, M., Biesbroek, R., & Gupta, A. (2025). Strategic resilience: outlining a new government approach to climate change adaptation. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/strategic-resilience.pdf

Chicago

Benzie, Magnus, Robbert Biesbroek, and Aarti Gupta. Strategic resilience: outlining a new government approach to climate change adaptation. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2025. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/strategic-resilience.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Benzie |first1=Magnus |last2=Biesbroek |first2=Robbert |last3=Gupta |first3=Aarti |title=Strategic resilience: outlining a new government approach to climate change adaptation |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=November 2025 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/strategic-resilience.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{benzie2025strategic, author = {Benzie, Magnus and Biesbroek, Robbert and Gupta, Aarti}, title = {{Strategic resilience: outlining a new government approach to climate change adaptation}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2025}, month = nov, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/strategic-resilience.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }