Climate adaptation pathways for agri-food systems: a conceptual framework for scalable application

Climate change is placing increasing pressure on agri-food systems, yet adaptation planning remains fragmented and weakly connected to global scenario frameworks. We develop a conceptual framework for global adaptation pathways that links Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to sector-specific adaptation through a structured sequence of decisions over time. The framework combines SSP-based assumptions, agri-food system drivers, and guiding principles that organize adaptation strategies along technological–nature-based and hold–bend–shift dimensions. Using an expert-based process, we identify and sequence adaptation measures to explore pathways for maintaining stable and nutritious food systems under growing climate impacts. Near-term, low-regret measures are broadly feasible across scenarios, but pathways diverge as systems move toward more systemic and transformational responses. These divergences reflect differences in governance capacity, access to capital, technology diffusion, trade conditions, and social inclusion embedded in SSP scenarios. Example applications to the Netherlands and Benin demonstrate how globally structured adaptation pathways can be regionally differentiated, with the same measures becoming constrained or infeasible under the same SSP but different contexts, or different future SSPs. The framework treats adaptation as a dynamic, path-dependent process shaped by evolving constraints and opportunities and provides a basis for linking global scenarios with decision-making in agri-food systems under uncertainty.