The framework extends and builds on insights from the companion SEI report Beyond Hazards and Sectors: Governing Systemic Climate Risks.

It is intended as a tool to guide policymakers, analysts and practitioners in making more coherent policies and decisions on climate adaptation.

Building on insights from adaptation policy experts and comparative analytical work into a set of pillars, principles and decision criteria that can help make adaptation policy more coherent, more equitable and more robust under uncertainty.

The framework can be applied at multiple governance levels: by central agencies responsible for strategy and resource allocation; by sector bodies that set standards and manage investment pipelines; and by regional or municipal actors implementing measures on the ground. In each case, the emphasis is on decisions that influence vulnerability across sectors, places and time horizons.

The framework is offered as adaptable scaffolding for stress-testing decisions in context. The framework:

• uses three core pillars to define what makes climate risk systemic and why conventional, hazard- and sector-based approaches fall short
• translates these pillars into a set of principles and criteria for assessing whether specific adaptation measures, portfolios or policy reforms enhance systemic resilience or risk reinforcing fragmentation and maladaptation
• ensures that problem framing, option design, and success metrics are informed by affected groups and diverse knowledge systems (including Indigenous and local knowledge where relevant), and that decision authority and finance are devolved where appropriate
• highlights cross-cutting conditions – especially capacities and incentives – that determine whether systemic ambitions can be delivered in practice.

The framework does not offer a ready-made toolkit to be adopted wholesale. Instead, it is a normative and analytical guide that can be applied selectively at key decision points – for example when shaping national strategies and funding programs, screening sector standards and investment pipelines, or prioritizing local actions with cross-sector implications.

It is intended for use at national/central, sectoral, and subnational/local levels, and should be refined over time as evidence, practice and political realities evolve.