This special issue explores the centrality of finance, risk rating, and valuation in driving urban adaptation pathways and outcomes. The articles in this issue do so through a vast set of sites. These include adaptation efforts underway in high- and low-income cities in Mexico, Portugal, India, the United States, and Taiwan, as well as novel climate risk governance experiments in large and small cities in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. The articles also look beyond the boundaries of the city and explore the risk rating and valuation practices of increasingly climate-exposed insurance companies and water utilities in Australia and the United Kingdom. All the articles trace the complex and consequential interplay of risk, finance, and adaptation in cities with a specific goal in mind: to consider how urban policies, financing, and planning measures can be repurposed to advance equitable, transformative adaptation.