Adaptation Playbooks for 2026: Turning Climate Risk into ROI

Andy Paterson • December 18th, 2025.

2026 will be a pivotal year for climate adaptation. Both 2024 and 2025 were record-breaking years for climate-related costs. Those costs are expected to increase. At ClimateAi, we are reflecting on what has helped our clients bring down the cost of inaction and sharing these findings as climate adaptation playbooks to help others prepare for 2026.

We recently held a webinar (below) on this subject. Sharing what our climate models expect in the coming year and how that should shape your strategic decision-making. For those who missed the webinar, we have summarized the takeaways below.

What We’re Hearing From Leaders Going into 2026

Businesses across sectors understand that the climate problem is large and growing. They also see that AI has significant potential to mitigate climate challenges. 

Where they struggle is determining where to focus, prioritize, and act to maximize ROI. We are hearing from our most successful clients that the best way to ensure this is to take a highly dynamic, proactive approach to planning and make those plans cross-functional across the company.

As we enter 2026, we expect increased variability day to day and week to week, but we are seeing fewer signals about the overall trend due to a weak El Niño. The only way to monitor for significant changes as the year progresses is to conduct regular reviews and adjust plans as they arise. 

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ClimateAi’s 2026 Adaptation Framework

Successful adaptation playbooks in 2026 will be company-wide, dynamic, and driven by ROI. To ensure that is achieved, we put together this four-point framework that guides clients through the implementation of AI and adaptation across multiple levels of the business, starting with strategy:

1. Strategy – Prioritize adaptation investments by ROI
2. Company – Align those priorities across different business functions
3. Planning – Build adaptive, forecast-driven, proactive plans
4. Field Ops – Execution of plans on the ground

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1. Strategy: The Adaptation ROI Playbook

This step is not about implementing a climate adaptation or AI strategy. It’s about integrating these two into your broader business strategy. 

Many of our clients recognize the climate problem and want to know how to implement adaptation, but connecting the dots for the business case is more difficult. In recent work with our partner, the Japanese IT company NEC, we developed a model to estimate the return on investment of specific adaptation actions for agriculture in the Global South.

Our three steps to prioritizing adaptation around ROI:

1. Assess a crop’s potential climate risks in the region where it is grown.
2. AI simulations evaluate adaptation options (planting timing, irrigation, seed varietals, etc.)  across long-term climate futures.
3. As a result, we get a clear recommendation on which adaptation measures deliver the most compelling business value for any crop in any geography.
   

In 2026, we advise clients to identify the two or three most significant business problems they face related to climate risks, along with 1-2 adaptation solutions. Then we can assess which of those have the strongest business case, and can prioritize accordingly. 

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2. Company: The Cross-Functional Playbook

This results in:

• Shared metrics on the potential for extreme heat, storms, etc., to make concerted decisions around planting, irrigation, and harvest timing to avoid losses.
• Better knowledge around yield and quality way ahead of time, to ensure supply amounts and improve pricing decisions.

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3. Planning: Building Adaptive Plans

With increasingly unpredictable weather, setting a plan each year at a fixed time is no longer effective. Planning now must be proactive and dynamic, occurring at different times throughout the year as conditions evolve. 

We identified an approach that establishes 3-4 thresholds for hazards that, if breached, will lead to crop loss, enabling rapid adjustments to harvesting, logistics, and planting. Setting automated alerts around those thresholds, where our platform e-mails or notifies users, ensures actions are taken promptly.

So our planning approach for 2026 would be to:

• Define high-risk thresholds and set up alerts around them.
• Monitor both the weather and how it impacts crops you care about by using the Growing Degree Tool (GDD) and others.
• Build decision windows around forecast confidence, and be prepared to adjust plans multiple times as forecasts evolve. 

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4. Field Operations: Day-to-Day Responsiveness

Weather unpredictability can lead to highly unproductive company actions across site visits, logistics timing, and supply routes. However, when you take the steps above: Align priorities around ROI, train multiple functions on these priorities, and integrate that into a dynamic planning structure. Employees should now be thinking about how to leverage this technology and insights in the day-to-day running of the business.

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In 2026, winners in climate adaptation will adopt more dynamic, proactive strategies integrated across the business. As climate risks accelerate and the cost of inaction on adaptation rises, companies should replicate these playbooks to avoid losses and improve their ROI.

Stay tuned: in 2026, we will continue to improve the accuracy and technological innovation of our models, launch a communications hub to enhance cross-functional engagement, and further integrate our AI agent across our platforms to simplify your adaptation strategies and adoption at the field level. 

👉See which adaptation actions would deliver the highest ROI for you in 2026.

Climate Adaptation Playbooks 2026 FAQs