Mitigating the negative impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, drought, and species extinction requires effectively mobilizing social and ecological resources across geographic distances. Climate change adaptation practitioners need to understand climate change from a systems perspective, whereby the ecological and social components involved are viewed as interacting and interrelated components of a system that together yield consequences for both human and non-human life. Network analysis, a set of techniques that allows for quantitative and qualitative depiction of the relationships between system components and how they give rise to emergent phenomena, has the potential to help address contemporary sustainability challenges such as climate change adaptation. Adaptation practitioners have already begun using network analysis with the goal of improving their adaptation efforts, but the literature to guide their practice is young. The first chapter of my thesis addresses this problem by reviewing network analysis studies about climate change adaptation. I identified research gaps and opportunities related to the type of network analysis, adaptation sectors, geographic scale, number of systems, study objectives, and proposed network interventions. In the second chapter, I developed a framework called the metacoupled network approach that can help network analysis studies address these research gaps. Such a framework will not only guide network analysis studies in climate change adaptation but also provide a useful framework for understanding other complex social-ecological challenges.
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