Our broad aim is to increase the capacity of communities to develop, share, and learn from one another to implement climate change adaptation at speed and scale

Sharing adaptation case studies that show how to overcome challenges and achieve success are increasingly sought by and produced by adaptation practitioners across sectors (e.g., water, energy, transportation, agriculture). Yet, little is actually being done to understand the value case studies bring. We will design and implement an evaluation framework to help test, validate, and learn from the water utility climate alliance (wuca), an alliance of 12 of the nations largest water providers, and similarly positioned utilities on how developing and sharing case studies has impacted their adaptation planning and implementation over the past decade. Building from a wealth of existing case studies created through recent projects supported by wuca, we will (i) learn what more generally makes an adaptation case study impactful, (II) investigate the case study development process how IT works, what is most valuable about the process, and in what ways IT could better capture the full suite of societal impacts, and (III) identify what case studies alone cannot achieve. We will also, simultaneously, support updating wucas leading practices in climate adaptation, an existing resource built on utility-specific insights and case studies. Our methods include content analysis, case study user research (focus groups and surveys), and facilitated discussions with case study producers. Broader impact: as impacts from climate change accelerate, the ability to learn while doing is becoming ever-more important in climate adaptation planning. This project applies social science to real-world implementation of adaptation actions to meaningfully advance our understanding of what works (or does not) and what scales (or remains context-dependent). Our findings will form a playbook to illustrate ways case studies could most effectively be developed and deployed to (i) support peer-learning and (II) include measures of the full suite of societal benefits and impacts of adaptation actions to aid in identifying the opportunities and feasibility of transformative adaptation actions. The project will also help meet the hunger for practical, tested adaptation case studies that communities can replicate and scale up, an important foundation to enabling communities to assess and respond to their climate risks.