ORIGINAL ARTICLE Ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change: defining hotspot municipalities for policy design and implementation in Brazil Thaís Pacheco Kasecker 1,2 & Mario Barroso Ramos-Neto 3 & Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva 4 & Fabio Rubio Scarano 2,5 Received: 5 July 2017 /Accepted: 9 November 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017 Abstract We developed an indicator that defines priority municipalities in order to facilitate the deployment of preventive policies and strategies for ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change (EbA) in Brazilian municipalities. Based on the premises that poor people are the population most vulnerable to climate change and that conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosys- tems are adaptive to climate change, our indicator uses three parameters: (1) poverty, (2) proportion of natural-vegetation cover, and (3) exposure to climate change. Thus, we searched for Brazilian municipalities that simultaneously belonged to the quartile of municipalities with the highest Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-017-9768-6 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article ( https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-017-9768-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Thaís Pacheco Kasecker tkasecker@conservation.org Mario Barroso Ramos-Neto mario.barroso@tnc.org Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva jcsilva@miami.edu Fabio Rubio Scarano fscarano@fbds.org.br 1 Conservation International do Brasil, Rio Branco Avenue, 131-8° floor, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20040006, Brazil 2 Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, CCS, IB, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21941970, Brazil 3 The Nature Conservancy, Brasilia, Brazil 4 University of Miami, Miami, USA 5 Fundação Brasileira para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil