Businesses need research to guide adaptation beyond quick ‘maladaptive’ fixes and toward long-term resilience
As global temperatures continue their inexorable rise, companies face a difficult truth: It isn’t enough to cut carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change. They also need to adapt to the growing dangers of drought, fire and flood.
The problem with adaptation is that addressing one threat can create new risks, often passed on to others. More air conditioning during heat waves can mean more carbon emissions where fossil fuels are used to generate electricity. Increased irrigation to keep crops alive during droughts can put greater stress on already stretched water supplies.
Adaptation strategies, then, need to be sustainable. But if companies want guidance on how to make adaptation more effective and equitable, they won’t get much help from current management research, UCLA Anderson’s Magali Delmas and University of Rhode Island’s Mallory Flowers argue, in a paper published in Organization & Environment. Not only does scholarship need to give more attention to climate adaptation, they write, but it also needs to understand how to make sure strategies aren’t “maladaptive,’ more likely to have negative effects and work against long-term resilience.
Management Theory Wasn’t Built For This
This means recognizing that adaptation involves irreversible environmental impacts and uncertainty about its long-term effects, along with having consequences for communities and future generations. Delmas and Flowers call for “institutional transformation within planetary boundaries. This shift requires abandoning the illusion that organizations can adapt their way out of climate change while maintaining business as usual.”
“Adapting to climate change brings challenges that existing management theory was simply not built to handle,” Delmas says in an email exchange (Delmas also answers some thorny questions around the topic at the end of the article). “To take these challenges seriously, management scholarship needs to reach beyond its usual boundaries and draw on fields like ecology, resilience science and environmental justice.”
Organizations are already moving beyond mitigation to deal with the effects of climate change. Adaptation, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change says, is “a critical component of the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems.”
Yet to avoid maladaptive practices, the authors write, sustainable adaptation restores and regenerates resources and doesn’t deplete them. It distributes risks and benefits equitably across all stakeholders, including future ones. Further, it is flexible, using a variety of adaptive actions instead of committing to a single solution, taking into account the high level of uncertainty around climate impacts and measures to limit them.
Adaptation in the Bordeaux Wine Growing Region
It requires a broader view of management. “In most management research, environments refer to markets, competitors or institutions. Under climate change, however, the environment becomes biophysical and reactive. Droughts, fires and floods are ecological feedbacks shaped by human activity, collapsing the conceptual boundary between organizations and ecosystems — often in ways that cannot be undone.”
To see adaptation at work, Delmas and Flowers focus on the wine industry. Like agriculture in general, grape and wine production is especially sensitive to climate-driven disruptions, which can affect total yields, wine quality and the economic viability of some producers. One forecast predicts wine production in France’s prestigious Bordeaux region could decline 85% by 2050.
Wine producers in Bordeaux and elsewhere are trying to adapt but, as Delmas and Flowers observe, not all their approaches are sustainable. Irrigation can help protect vines during extended dry spells but also can increase the risk of scarcity in surrounding areas. Expanding the size of vineyards to compensate for declining yields cuts into woodlands and other habitats and threatens biodiversity. Increased use of air conditioning and refrigeration can shield winemaking from heat extremes and can also mean greater reliance on fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Other possible adaptations involve a wholesale rethinking of the business. Producers can relocate to more suitable regions or replace existing varieties with those better adapted to new conditions. But neither approach is desirable for products, like Bordeaux wines, which rely on its strong regional and consumer associations. “It is unthinkable that Bordeaux wines could be produced outside the Bordeaux region or made with nontraditional grape varieties,” writes one researcher.
More sustainable approaches are possible. Precision irrigation — using sensors and satellite data to apply water only when and where and in quantities it is needed — combined with cover crops (to protect soil and maintain moisture) between vine rows can reduce reliance on scarce water supplies. Solar panels and more efficient cooling and refrigeration reduce energy demand and carbon emissions. In France, wine authorities have allowed growers to add six new grape varieties to complement existing varietals as an alternative to a wholesale replacement of the merlot and cabernet sauvignon grapes that define Bordeaux wines.
Grabbing the handiest or cheapest fix won’t chart a lasting solution, Delmas and Flowers note. “Adaptation is often framed as a pragmatic necessity, a means of protecting livelihoods and assets from climate shocks. However, for management scholars, it represents much more: It is an intellectual and moral inflection point that compels us to reexamine the foundations of organizational theory.”
Management research can help businesses understand how and why some strategies are maladaptive and some are sustainable. It can demonstrate how technical solutions developed by scientists and engineers can be established in practice. Research also can explore who in an organization has the authority to make adaptation decisions, what information they have at their disposal and how existing success metrics provide incentives for either sustainable or maladaptive practices.
“For practitioners, three questions can distinguish sustainable from maladaptive responses: Does this strategy maintain or restore the resources it uses? Who benefits and who bears the costs across supply chains, communities and future periods? Have we established monitoring systems and governance structures capable of detecting and correcting course when adaptation generates unintended consequences?”
While Delmas says management scholarship may not be up to the task now, the urgency of the problem will help push the field to change. “Climate adaptation is no longer a side issue for management researchers,” she says. “We either develop the thinking to guide it well, or we leave the people making these decisions without the support they need at exactly the moment it matters most.”
Q&A with Magali Delmas, Professor of Strategy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, and Faculty Director of the UCLA Anderson Center for Impact
Anderson Review: The task here is urgent, complex and full of uncertainties, in an era when business has tended to streamline and simplify its management ranks and operations. Do companies have the chops for this, even if researchers lay out a workable path?
Magali Delmas: Honestly, most don’t yet — that’s part of why we wrote the paper. The streamlining point cuts deep: The capacities sustainable adaptation requires are precisely the ones lean-management orthodoxy has stripped out — redundancy to pursue several adaptive options under uncertainty, long time horizons so consequences a decade out register on someone’s dashboard, and cross-disciplinary fluency to draw on ecology and environmental justice alongside finance and operations.
But I don’t think the answer is for every firm to grow these capacities in-house. Look at where adaptation is happening competently. In Bordeaux it’s not individual châteaux solving this alone; it’s a dense regional fabric of appellation authorities, public agricultural research institutes, cooperatives, and water agencies inside which firms operate. The chops may need to live in that institutional fabric more than inside any single company. Researchers can help by clarifying who holds adaptation authority, what information they have and whether their performance metrics reward sustainable choices or punish them.
AR: The paper asks how companies should “coordinate” with governments, NGOs and others. But haven’t most environmental advances come from either outright regulation of pollution or lucrative government subsidies of clean energy?
Delmas: You’re right that the big environmental wins of the last half-century came from regulation and subsidies, and I’m not arguing against either. But governments are often slow and don’t have full visibility into what’s happening on the ground, especially with adaptation, which plays out locally and in real time.
That’s where information and coordination do real work. A Bordeaux winemaker irrigating through a drought may be fully compliant with water law while still drawing down an aquifer a neighboring grower depends on. Better data and shared monitoring can surface the problem long before regulation catches up — and often that’s what eventually pushes governments to act more intelligently.
AR: This isn’t a climate adaptation, but the boom in data centers now is taxing scarce electricity and water resources, with the justification (we’ve heard this before) that we can’t afford to fall behind in AI. How do we put climate change front burner again?
Delmas: The data center buildout is a textbook case of what our paper warns against: maladaptation in different clothes. A data center siting in Phoenix or central Texas draws on stressed aquifers and grids, with much of the cost displaced onto ratepayers, farmers and future water users. Run it through our three questions: It doesn’t restore the resources it consumes, the costs fall on parties who never consented to bear them, and no governance structure is positioned to course-correct. “We can’t fall behind in AI” is structurally identical to “we can’t let the vineyard fail” — urgency invoked to justify a quick fix that creates worse problems for someone else.
How to keep climate front burner is harder. Stop treating it as a separate file from technology and industrial policy: The data center story is a climate story, about water budgets, electricity mix and who absorbs risk. And lead with the distributional question — “who benefits and who bears the costs” is what turns an abstract concern into a concrete political claim communities and policymakers actually engage with.
The underlying worry in our paper is that as long as adaptation — whether to climate or to AI demand — is framed as a pragmatic necessity, the maladaptive option keeps winning on speed and convenience. The point of building the research base now is so that the next wave of these decisions has somewhere better to land than “we had to move fast.”
Featured Faculty
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Magali Delmas
Professor of Management; Faculty Director, Impact@Anderson
About the Research
Delmas, M. A., & Flowers, M. E. (2026). Can Climate Adaptation Be Sustainable? Organization & Environment.
