Climate change adaptation: a systematic review on domains and indicators

In recent years, climate change has been one of the most complicated problems that human being has faced. Climate change adaptation (CCA) is considered to be an important component of risk management. In order to achieve adaptation, it is necessary to determine the indicators influencing adaptation in each community and this requires measurement and standard tools. The aim of this study is to determine and categorize the indicators of CCA. International electronic databases including Science Direct, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar were investigated for only articles published in English language. In addition, Iranian databases including Irandoc, SID, and Magiran were investigated. There was no limitation on the methods of studies. Furthermore, snowball method was used for finding more articles while the ProQuest database was searched for related dissertations. The published documents from 1990 to November 2017 were gathered in this study. Out of 4439 publications initially search, 152 full texts were investigated. Finally, a total of 45 potentially relevant citations were included for full text review; in addition, fourteen other sources were investigated. Using snowball method, we found 24 other articles that were included in our final result. From the searches, 176 indicators were identified, while seven main domains were mentioned. Since in the articles, domains of adaptation are not in the form of a model, it is better to focus on this issue in the future and it seems that prioritizing and weighting domains in adaptation in different communities with different needs are an important issue.