Leveraging Multiple Resilience Dividend Concept for Transformative Adaptation Planning

Approaches for climate change adaptation (CCA) planning have traditionally been built around risk-avoidance and loss-reduction models, with co-benefits treated as secondary considerations. This narrow focus overlooks the wider societal, economic, and environmental benefits — as well as potential trade-offs— that CCA may have, which contributes to persistent underinvestment in adaptation and misses opportunities to advance sustainable development. This gap underscores the need for more integrated approaches that comprehensively understand the CCA's multifaceted impacts. Different decision-making frameworks have been proposed, but the application and understanding of resilience-based approaches remain limited, particularly concerning their actionability and evidence base. To this effect, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework for embedding the Multiple Resilience Dividends (MRD) lens into the full CCA planning cycle to better capture the broad value of adaptation actions. Building on and extending the “triple resilience dividend” concept, the MRD approach recognises that adaptation interventions generate a diverse set of direct and indirect effects—beneficial and adverse—across interconnected systems, sectors, scales, and timeframes. By placing MRD thinking at the core of key planning stages—including problem framing, risk assessment, option identification, appraisal, decision-making, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation—we explain how CCA can shift from siloed, risk-centric practices toward integrated, multi-objective, and transformational strategies. The proposed framework highlights how MRD supports systems thinking, strengthens stakeholder-centred design, enhances legitimacy, reveals synergies and trade-offs, and improves the robustness and viability of adaptation pathways. Through an illustrative example in a coastal urban context, we show how MRD-informed planning can unlock more equitable, cost-effective, and sustainable adaptation portfolios. Overall, we argue that operationalising MRD offers a critical pathway for accelerating climate resilience by reframing adaptation as a generator of multiple dividends rather than a cost focused solely on risk reduction.