Field Notes: Who Decides What Counts? Rethinking Climate Adaptation
At a time when communities across Canada face floods, wildfires, coastal erosion, and permafrost thaw, Elisabeth Gilmore is examining what equitable climate adaptation looks like—and who decides. A new SSHRC Connection Grant brings together researchers, Indigenous Knowledge holders, and policymakers to link local action with global adaptation efforts under the Paris Agreement.
What are you focused on these days?
Two projects, both about whose voices count and who holds power in climate adaptation. The first is the Global Goal on Adaptation, or GGA, which sits within the Paris Agreement as the adaptation counterpart to the 1.5ºC mitigation goal. I spent the last two years as one of 78 technical experts, and one of three Canadians, developing a framework of indicators to track progress against that goal. A modified framework was adopted in 2025 at the international climate negotiations (COP30) in Belém. The newly awarded SSHRC Connection Grant now lets us bring the work home. This grant aims to bring this to the communities and practitioners in Canada so that they can inform our domestic efforts. This effort also focuses our efforts on contributing to the international process, knowing that the sharpest adaptation pressures fall on countries and communities that have had the least hand in setting the terms.
The second is a New Frontiers in Research Fund project called PATH, short for Transforming Places for the Precariously Housed. It works with partners across high- and low-income settings: Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Nepal, including Inuit partners. Canada and the UK have their own pockets of precarity, and our partners in South Africa and Nepal bring long experience with adaptation under constraint. Working across both contexts lets us ask what equitable adaptation looks like for people whose relationship to housing and place is already precarious, wherever they live. While the GGA asks how Canada measures adaptation, at home and in the world, PATH asks what we miss when we measure the wrong things, and it keeps the work anchored in communities whose voices are usually furthest from the tables where indicators get set.
Why is this work important right now?
Climate impacts are also much less abstract for Canadians now. Communities are already rebuilding after wildfires, managing coastal erosion, and watching permafrost thaw. The question is no longer whether to adapt but how to do it well, equitably, and in ways that work across very different regions and knowledge systems. How we measure shapes what we can answer.
The GGA indicators were adopted at the end of 2025, piloting runs from 2026 through 2028, and a full review is scheduled after the global stocktake in 2029. What Canada contributes during this piloting phase will shape how adaptation progress is defined and compared internationally for years. Decisions about whose knowledge counts, and what success looks like, are being made now.
What is a question you hope to answer with your research?
Who decides what successful adaptation looks like, and how do we make sure that answer reflects the people most affected?
Measurement is never neutral. An indicator is a value judgement about what counts, and the GGA has been one of the most contested elements of the Paris Agreement partly because the voices with the most at stake, whether countries in the Global South, Indigenous Peoples, or communities living with precarity in wealthier countries like our own, are routinely absent from the rooms where those decisions get made. Canada has its own pockets of precarity, and our domestic adaptation efforts can reproduce the same exclusions unless we are careful to keep asking who is not in the room.
What is something people would be surprised to learn?
That transformational adaptation is actionable. The term gets used a lot in climate policy, and it is embedded in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports where I have been involved. But, in practice it often shows up as aspirational language rather than a guide to what to do. Part of the problem is that we have talked about transformation a lot without being specific about where it needs to happen or who needs to be making it happen.
Through our work, we argue transformation starts from the futures that people on the margins would want to live in, and it has to bring them into the decisions that shape those futures. Without that, transformational adaptation stays a phrase. With it, it becomes something you can implement.
What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?
That adaptation is a technical problem. If we just get the hydrological models right, engineer the correct seawall, or publish an authoritative risk map, the rest will follow. It will not. I say this as someone trained as an engineer, cross-appointed in environmental engineering, and I take the technical work seriously. But adaptation is also a governance problem dressed in technical language. Who gets warned before a flood, who is helped to relocate afterward, which neighbourhoods are judged worth protecting: these are political and distributional decisions, and they determine whether adaptation is effective or whether it deepens existing inequalities. The GGA indicators work is, among other things, an attempt to take that observation seriously at the international level.
Any new projects you’re excited about?
The Canadian side of the GGA work is where most of my attention is turning. After two years in the international expert group, the more interesting question now is what these indicators can mean on the ground here, and how our answers land alongside what is being asked for internationally. Those two conversations are too often treated as separate in Canada, and they are not.
What’s your favourite class to teach?
The Climate Change Collaborative graduate seminar. It pulls together students from across the university, engineers, physical sciences, geographers, and economists, and puts them in the same room on the same problem. It takes everyone slightly out of their comfort zone, which is exactly the point. Climate adaptation does not respect disciplinary lines, and the students who will do this work for the next thirty years cannot afford to either. What I appreciate most is watching how quickly they start building something together. It is a small reminder that the adaptability question also runs through our classrooms.