Short answers, pulled from the story.
Adaptive capacity in climate change is the latent potential of systems, institutions, and populations to adjust to changing conditions, recover from damage, or take advantage of new opportunities. Along with hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, it is one of four components that scientists use to assess climate risk.
The three biological traits that characterize a species' adaptive capacity are phenotypic plasticity, dispersal ability, and genetic diversity. Together, these traits determine whether a species can acclimate in place or track suitable climate conditions across the landscape.
The local adaptive capacity (LAC) framework, introduced by the Overseas Development Institute, identifies five core characteristics of adaptive capacity in communities: an asset base, appropriate institutions and entitlements, knowledge and information systems, innovation, and flexible forward-looking governance. Each characteristic describes a distinct resource or structural condition that enables households and communities to respond to changing circumstances.
The Omega state, identified by the Resilience Alliance, is a condition of low potential, low complexity, and low resilience that results when a system's adaptive capacity is exceeded by disturbances. A system in this state has lost not only its current function but much of its capacity to rebuild.
Barriers to adaptive capacity include internal factors such as reluctance to relocate from flood-prone areas, external factors such as the absence of available land during flooding or wildfires, and organizational factors such as disconnects between government policy and local action. Scholars also identify lack of resources, inadequate financial incentives for long-term planning, and skepticism about climate urgency as persistent organizational barriers.
Adaptive capacity traces to the earliest replicating RNA molecules, which required three mechanisms of Darwinian selection: heritability, variation of type, and differential reproductive output. Three primary adaptive capacities likely determined the fitness of such a replicator: replication with moderate fidelity, resistance to decay, and the ability to acquire and process resources, all operating through folded configurations determined by the molecule's nucleotide sequence.