Understanding climate change adaptation constraints for different actors — governments, communities, individuals, and households — is essential, as adaptation turns into a matter of survival. Though rich qualitative research reveals constraints for diverse cases, methods to consolidate knowledge and elicit patterns in adaptation constraints for various actors are scarce. Therefore, this work analyzes associations between different adaptations and actors’ constraints to climate-induced floods and sea-level rise. Our novel approach derives textual data from peer-reviewed articles (published before February 2024) by using natural language processing, thematic coding books, and network analysis. The results show that social capital, economic factors, and government support are constraints shared among all actors.

Climate change is projected to adversely affect agriculture worldwide. This requires farmers to adapt incrementally already early in the twenty-first century, and to pursue transformational adaptation to endure future climate-induced damages. Many articles discuss the underlying mechanisms of farmers’ adaptation to climate change using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. However, only the former is typically included in quantitative metanalysis of empirical evidence on adaptation. This omits the vast body of knowledge from qualitative research. We address this gap by performing a comparative analysis of factors associated with farmers’ climate change adaptation in both quantitative and qualitative literature using Natural Language Processing and generalized linear models. By retrieving publications from Scopus, we derive a database with metadata and associations from both quantitative and qualitative findings, focusing on climate change adaptation of farmers. We use the derived data as input for generalized linear models to analyze whether reported factors behind farmers’ decisions differ by type of adaptation (incremental vs. transformational) and across different global regions. Our results show that factors related to adaptive capacity and access to information and technology are more likely to be associated with transformational adaptation than with incremental adaptation. Regarding world regions, access to finance/income and infrastructure are uneven, with farmers in high-income countries having an advantage, whereas farmers in low- and middle-income countries require these the most for effective adaptation to climate change.