With the emergence of adaptation as a key focus for those interested in effective responses to the impacts of climate change, it is increasingly important to better understand the relationship between adaptation and development. Many decision-makers in developing and developed countries distinguish between the two because they view support for adaptation as additional to existing development aid. This distinction is also viewed as important to prevent the diversion of adaptation-related funds towards conventional development objectives and programmes. But for many, a firm division artificially separates policy goals that should be integrated for more efficient outcomes, for example, by mainstreaming climate concerns into overall development goals.

Intuitively, it is easy to accept that development and adaptation are not equivalent even if a well-articulated and theoretically informed relationship has been difficult to pinpoint: both adaptation and development are fraught and contested concepts. But difficulties in distinguishing adaptation from development hinder empirical research on the subject and are an obstacle to policy innovations. We suggest that adaptation and development in the context of climate change can be separated by a focus on risks and risk management, and that this difference is paramount because climate change risks are redefining what development policies can accomplish. Such a focus can also help in devising more concrete and targeted strategies to reduce adaptation deficits, defined as the gap between the need for adaptation versus current and anticipated future adaptation actions.

Over the past century, development approaches have been linked to specific policy orientations: solving poverty through economic growth; addressing inequality through redistribution; and more recently, preventing environmental degradation through sustainable resource use5. These development approaches do not focus on risk management as a central policy goal, even if their implementation sometimes addresses risks. We propose 'adaptive development' as a form of development that mitigates risks without negatively influencing the well-being of human subjects and ecosystems.