Editorial: Adaptive frontiers in the anthropocene: human-environment dynamics in the face of climate change

Editorial on the Research Topic
Adaptive frontiers in the anthropocene: human-environment dynamics in the face of climate change

The Anthropocene is an unprecedented planetary condition in which human activities shape climate risks while simultaneously facing the consequences of those transformations. However, the communities that contribute least to climate change often bear the significant burden of its impacts. This Research Topic, Adaptive Frontiers in the Anthropocene: Human-environment Dynamics in the Face of Climate Change, was conceived to evaluate how capabilities, vulnerabilities, and institutional arrangements interact to shape adaptation practices in the climatically exposed regions. Across five scholarly contributions, the papers show how values, organizations, conservation regimes, coastal hazards, and justice frameworks collectively define and redefine adaptation frontiers.

The first paper investigates the frontier of the socio-cultural foundations of cooperation surrounding climate as a public good. In this experimental study on young Chinese participants, Pansini and Shi show that collectivist values support higher mitigation in climate-related social dilemmas, such as air pollution and reforestation. They enunciated that the collective values can further help resolve climate-related social dilemmas that are hard to address in individualistic settings. Their threshold public goods game reveals that groups embedded in collectivist value systems achieved substantially higher success rates in funding reforestation initiatives than did individualistic societies. Their findings show that climate responses, including both adaptation and mitigation, are not solely technical matters but are fundamentally shaped by cultural and behavioral factors. Social learning, shared civic norms, and prosocial preferences can move groups toward cooperative action even when outcomes are uncertain.

A second adaptive frontier emerges within organizations operating in climate-affected settings. Juanmei et al. shift attention to the organizational scale, examining how manufacturing firms pursue climate adaptation and manage the paradox of environmental innovation and employee wellbeing. Their Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach identifies organizational justice and innovative organizational culture as critical mediators between climate-adaptive pressures and burnout outcomes. They also identified that employees' innovative behavior moderates these relationships. This work underscores that organizations themselves are key sites of adaptation. Climate-resilient production systems rely on psychological sustainability, fair treatment, and innovation-ready cultures that can transform environmental pressures into opportunities for creative response rather than burnout or disengagement.

Another research also highlights the place-based vulnerabilities at the interface of conservation, food systems, and environmental justice. Effossou et al. examine the impacts of climate change on conservation areas and food systems in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Through qualitative research in Alicedale and Seven Fountains, they document how conservation-related restrictions, uneven access to land and water, and climate-induced agricultural disruptions jointly undermine local food security. Community proposal initiatives, such as shared land access, community boreholes, and small-scale farming, reveal how marginalized rural residents actively seek to rebalance conservation and livelihoods. The study demonstrates that effective adaptation in conservation landscapes must move beyond ecological targets and incorporate participatory governance to address historical inequalities, gendered burdens, and the right to food.

Coastal regions provide another critical frontier where human-environment dynamics are rapidly changing. Climate change and the associated risk of sea-level rise make these regions prone to a range of natural and socio-economic disasters. Xu et al. present a global systematic review of socio-economic impact assessments of high-tide flooding (HTF) that is becoming more frequent with sea-level rise. Their review shows that most quantified socio-economic HTF studies are concentrated in the United States, with hotspots in Norfolk and Miami. At the same time, significant gaps persist in many highly exposed coastal areas of Africa and Asia. The review documents impacts across public infrastructure, the private sector, human behavior, and environmental contamination. It also shows how inconsistent baselines and definitions make cross-site comparisons difficult. By clarifying what is known and where evidence is missing, the article pushes the research frontier toward more systematic and globally distributed assessments of everyday coastal flooding. It highlights that such routine flooding often causes cumulative harm long before so-called extreme events occur.

The fifth contribution by Monyei and Heintze offers a conceptual reframing of adaptation through the lens of positive peace. Based on a systematic review of climate change adaptation in the Global South, this work explains that adaptation is likely to be successful when it incorporates distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice associated with positive peace. The framework of this work connects justice-oriented adaptation processes such as inclusive decision-making, recognition of marginalized groups, and equitable benefit-sharing to more durable and socially cohesive outcomes. A case from the Solomon Islands illustrates how integrating peacebuilding logics into community-based adaptation enhances resilience and social cohesion. This work suggests that adaptation governance must move beyond risk management toward justice-centered transformation, particularly where legacies of inequality and exclusion hinder responses.

These five articles, together, chart a multi-scalar map of adaptive frontiers in the Anthropocene. At the micro level, they show how values and learning processes shape cooperative behavior in climate dilemmas. At the meso level, they reveal how collective entities, such as firms and conservation regimes, negotiate trade-offs between environmental aims and human wellbeing. At the macro and conceptual levels, they synthesize evidence on emergent hazards such as high-tide flooding and articulate justice and peace-oriented frameworks that can guide adaptation policy and practice. The Research Topic spans experimental economics, reinforcement learning, structural equation modeling, qualitative case study work, and systematic reviews, illustrating how methodological diversity is essential for understanding complex human-environment dynamics.

Three cross-cutting insights emerge from this Research Topic. First, adaptive capacity is relational, and it depends not only on material resources but also on social norms, institutional trust, and perceptions of fairness. Second, climate risks interact with other structural challenges, including labor conditions, conservation regimes, and coastal development, which, in turn, shape the degree of vulnerability. Third, justice and equity are not peripheral “co-benefits” but central conditions for long-term adequacy of adaptation, whether in rural South Africa, coastal cities facing HTF, or communities negotiating development and conservation in the Global South.

These collective insights point toward critical directions for future research. There is a clear need for increased transdisciplinary work that effectively links behavioral experiments with real-world policy contexts. Furthermore, research must prioritize longitudinal and comparative studies to track how everyday climatic stressors, such as HTF or gradual environmental degradation, reconfigure livelihoods. Crucially, researchers must expand empirical testing of justice and peace-centered adaptation frameworks to regions beyond existing concentrations of case studies. Ultimately, the contributions within this Research Topic demonstrate that adaptive frontiers are not fixed boundaries. They instead operate as dynamic, negotiated spaces where communities, organizations, and policymakers actively contest and reimagine the foundational terms of human-environment relations in pursuit of greater sustainability and justice.

Author contributions

MM: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. MH: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. AK: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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