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Island communities are the targets for a wide range of interventions designed to help them adapt to climate change. A growing body of research explores the equity and justice implications of adaptation policies and programmes, revealing they often exacerbate, rather than alleviate, inequality within at-risk communities. This paper pushes beyond existing understandings of climate justice, which prioritise its distributive and procedural aspects. Through household surveys, interviews and participant observation, the paper presents a case study of a major adaptation project in a small island community in the Philippines, paying particular attention to its equity implications at the local level. It describes how local politics and power relations distorted the well-intentioned aims of the project and resulted in the project exacerbating, rather than alleviating, pre-existing inequality. Climate change adaptation is a deeply political process that is easily subverted by the interests of the powerful. To mitigate the influence of power and politics in future climate adaptation projects, we present an expanded multidimensional framework for assessing adaptative justice that incorporates the neglected aspects of recognition and structure.

A generic systems dynamics (SD) model template for resilience is adapted to analyse flooding impacts on household assets and local government assets of Pasig City, Metro Manila. SD simulations are used to quantify the loss of system performance due to adverse impacts, and the recovery of the system due to response measures. The simulation results reflect the decreasing levels of resilience among low‐income households, and the reliance of local government on budgeting cycles to replenish assets. The initial model needs to be expanded to include other determinants of resilience, but this exploratory study reflects the potential usefulness of SD simulations as a decision support tool for city policy makers. By quantifying changes in resilience measures over time, simulations can complement qualitative analyses and test policy and programme scenarios.

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