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Climate change poses serious challenges to existing ecosystem governance systems due to the emerging issues that it presents. The chapter discusses two main characteristics of ecosystem governance (i.e., adaptive and collaborative) in the context of a changing climate. It examines the issues to be addressed in the review of governance systems such as ecosystem degradation, adaptation to climate change, and institutionalization of governance structures. It reiterates the importance of considering the consequences of climate change to the ecosystem, economy, and human well-being toward better ecosystem governance.

How water is managed is emerging as one of the core challenges of sustainable development and earth system governance (Pahl-Wostl, Gupta, & Petry, 2008a; Biermann et al., 2009). Floods and droughts already have a huge impact on human development and well-being. Adaptation to existing climate variability to reduce water insecurities is already a pressing need (Pielke, Prins, Rayner, & Sarewitz, 2007). Securing access to safe drinking water, allocating sufficient water to grow food, protecting life and property from floods, as well as maintaining river and floodplain ecosystems as countries develop economically, however, is a complex set of interlocking and dynamic challenges.

This chapter examines how implementation of SDG solutions can be improved through adaptive strategies. Many so-called blueprint strategies are inflexible during implementation and underestimate the importance fitting general goals and plans to shifting local needs and contexts. The chapter emphasizes the importance of identifying the specific types of dynamic challenges that will prompt the need for adaptation when implementing sustainability strategies. Adaptive cocreation provides a valuable framework for overcoming traps of various sorts that may block implementation. The problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) model is introduced as one approach to adaptation. PDIA is particularly valuable for achieving bottom-up integration of SDGs and projects. Finally, the chapter considers the importance of social learning as a strategy for collaborative adaptation.

The key concept of ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) is how to think of ecosystem in daily lifestyles (both in urban and rural areas), and how ecosystem-based adaptation can be a tool to adapt daily lives in changing climatic conditions. Sustainably managing, conserving, and restoring ecosystems so that they continue to provide the services that allow people to adapt to climate change is known as ecosystem-based adaptation. Summarizing the key observations provided in the earlier chapters, this chapter provides the ways of action-oriented ecosystem-based adaptation.

This chapter gives an overall description of how Japan has coped with COVID-19 pandemics. Under COVID-19 pandemics, many smaller communities tended to suffer less, or even survive better with small and modest adaptive approaches to transform themselves, than most larger cities and metropolitan regions. The cases of Tottori Prefecture and the town of Chizu are highlighted, and illustrations are made to explain how small and modest adaptive approaches have worked relatively well here. Some reasons have been examined such as good political leadership based on the former lessons learned from the previous coronavirus threats which Tottori Prefecture scarcely avoided in 2009 when South Korea suffered from them. The Town of Chizu has demonstrated well how the previous efforts to adaptively enhance community’s coping capacity called SMART Governance have worked effectively under the new persistent disruptive stressor (PDS), i.e. COVID-10 pandemics.

This case examines the concept and role of adaptability in destination governance, particularly as it relates to hosting a mega-event such as the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. It describes how the Resort Municipality of Whistler in British Columbia, Canada, used its broad sustainability-focused destination governance system to guide and manage relationships and outcomes related to the Games. Through its strategic and adaptive interactions with the International Olympic Committee and the Vancouver Organizing Committee, the Resort Municipality of Whistler leveraged unprecedented sustainability benefits from this mega-event.

In this chapter, governance in organizations is seen primarily as the governance of motivation of employees. It is argued that motivation is steered by cognitive frames (goal driven definitions of the situation), so that governance in organizations should focus mainly on the establishment and maintenance of frames. The chapter discusses how this may be done and how this cognitive approach to governance can be seen as an integration of transaction cost economics and the organizational behavior approach.