The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation and invites parties to review the effectiveness of adaptation actions. However, the measurement of adaptation success remains elusive. Focusing on the capabilities of households and governments to pursue a range of adaptation futures provides a more robust foundation. The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation (Article 7, para. 1) and invites Parties to "review the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation" in a global stocktake (Article 7, para 14c). However, creating universally applicable measures of adaptation success remains elusive given that most adaptation projects are implemented at the local level, and start from wildly differing baseline conditions. Further, the adaptation process is never truly "finished" in a changing, evolving climate 1. Berrang-Ford et al. 2 propose tracking government adaptation policy instruments as a way to assess progress. However, these and other approaches do not address what constitutes "success", focusing instead on government planning, or how vulnerability is changing-leaving open the question of vulnerability of whom, This comment evolved from a special session on adaptation success convened by the authors at Adaptation Futures 2018, the 5th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Cape Town. We thank the over 100 session participants from around the world, including participants from government agencies, donors, non-governmental organizations, students, humanitarian agencies, academics, policy-makers and members of civil society.

Infrastructures are critical for human society, but vulnerable to climate change. The current body of research on infrastructure adaptation does not adequately account for the interconnectedness of infrastructures, both internally and with one another. We take a step toward addressing this gap through the introduction of a framework for infrastructure adaptation that conceptualizes infrastructures as complex socio-technical ''systems of systems'' embedded in a changing natural environment. We demonstrate the use of this framework by structuring potential climate change impacts and identifying adaptation options for a preliminary set of cases-road, electricity and drinking water infrastructures. By helping to clarify the relationships between impacts at different levels, we find that the framework facilitates the identification of key nodes in the web of possible impacts and helps in the identification of particularly nocuous weather conditions. We also explore how the framework may be applied more comprehensively to facilitate adaptation governance. We suggest that it may help to ensure that the mental models of stakeholders and the quantitative models of researchers incorporate the essential aspects of interacting climate and infrastructure systems. Further research is necessary to test the framework in these contexts and to determine when and where its application may be most beneficial.

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