Everyone’s Adaptation: Exploring individual heat stress adaptation

Abstract

Due to rising temperatures, heat stress affects nearly everyone’s way of living. Adapting to heat stress is very individual, but our understanding of the process and conditions that influence such individual adaptation remains fragmented and limited. To address this knowledge gap, we introduce a novel conceptual framework, “Everyone’s Adaptation (EoA),”. This framework integrates insights from a range of inter- and trans-disciplinary concepts and theories from the individual to the collective level to explore the conditions under which individuals of all ages, genders, ethnicities, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds can adapt to heat stress. We argue that a better understanding of the key enabling and constraining conditions at individual and community levels, and fair and equitable governance, can inform sustainable, effective, and fair climate change adaptation policies. In this paper, we operationalize the EoA framework in the context of heat stress adaptation. We propose this framework can also be adapted for adaptation to other extreme climatic events in various local contexts.