Understanding climate change and resilience: assessing strengths and opportunities for adaptation in the Global South Marta Berbés-Blázquez 1 & Carrie L. Mitchell 1 & Sarah L. Burch 1 & Johanna Wandel 1 Received: 28 January 2016 /Accepted: 2 January 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract Better integration of resilience and climate change adaptation can help building climate-resilient development. Yet, resilience and adaptation to climate change have evolved largely along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization. Conceptual vagueness around resil- ience makes it challenging to ascertain what elements of resilience thinking have the greatest potential to enhance climate change adaptation and contribute to broader sustainable develop- ment goals. This article distills nine principles from the resilience literature to build a framework to assess 224 climate change adaptation strategies proposed by researchers and practitioners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our analysis concludes that adaptation strategies in this data set emphasize initiatives that increase social and ecological diversity, strengthen learning processes, build functional redundancy, enhance connectivity between social and ecological elements, pay attention to the management of slow variables, and provide mechanisms for increasing participation and polycentric governance. At the same time, the adaptation options examined generally lacked a system’ s perspective, suggesting that there is still important work ahead to move toward a climate-resilient development model. 1 Introduction The sheer complexity of climate change and the scope of its potential impacts require the integration of multiple research disciplines, levels of governance, and societal actors to inform the design of adequate adaptation strategies. Although originating within distinct epistemo- logical communities, over the years, resilience and climate change adaptation have begun informing one another. Notions from resilience thinking are seen as having a potential role in complementing and enhancing climate adaptation, particularly as resilience is well suited to deal with issues of uncertainty and complexity. Explorations on how resilience thinking can be Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-017-1897-0 * Marta Berbés-Blázquez mberbes@gmail.com 1 University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada