The Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP) at Fudan University and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in the United States officially released the joint research report Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change: A Comparative Study of Governance Processes in Australia, China, and the United States. Since 2021, with NAPA and IGPP as lead sponsors and Professor Dan Guttman (Fellow of NAPA and Adjunct Professor of IGPP) as the project coordinator,, a research team of two dozen social/natural science, law, and business scholars and practitioners from Australia, China and the United States have undertaken to study how the countries are meeting climate impacts, what can be learned from comparing governance efforts, and how extant governance tools and approaches may need transformation.
The report explains that in contrast to mitigation (greenhouse gas reduction) and further now longstanding environmental governance approaches, adaptation may call for transformation of core governance structures, tools and resources. Greenhouse gas reductions in one country will have a global effect. Adaptation, by contrast, is locally focused, requiring levels of data and analysis not now available and consideration of complex interactions among many human and natural systems, and local capacity to use data and analyses.
This report seeks to set a framework for use by practitioners and scholars for learning from country efforts to reduce adaptation governance deficits. The next phase of the work will focus on in-depth case studies of response strategies, crosscutting analyses of tools, resources and processes, and deepening the framework by engaging more countries and colleagues.
The research report can be downloaded at:
IGPP Webpage:
NAPA Webpage: