Adapting to the impacts of climate change is one of the most urgent priorities of our time. Given that the impacts of climate change are experienced at local scales, it makes sense that adaptation should occur locally, and yet, despite this, locals often have little control over how adaptation is funded, designed and delivered in order to climate-proof their places and futures. Increasingly competitive access to funding and limited progress towards sustainable adaptation outcomes prompts our call to rethink adaptation at the local scale. Drawing from grounded research with locals, we explore three case examples from the Asia-Pacific region, ranging from the coastal belt of Bangladesh, to a peri-urban informal settlement in the Philippines, and to a small rural island in Vanuatu. These examples help illustrate how locally led adaptation (LLA) gives us hope for more equitable, effective and sustainable adaptation outcomes. We show how LLA can help to reduce dependency and support local autonomy, diverse capabilities and creativity. We propose nine mutually reinforcing drivers of LLA to improve grassroots initiatives. These drivers focus on locally led decision-making, local strengths and resources (e.g. institutions, social networks, local knowledge and coping mechanisms), local realities, local vulnerability contexts and inequalities, local metrics for measuring “success”, and local agendas which should be supported or enabled by external agencies. These drivers support local people to determine their own adaptation futures and ensure finite funding resources are utilised in meaningful ways.

As human activities have destabilised life on Earth, a new geological era is upon us. While there is a myriad of challenges that have emerged because of such human-driven planetary changes, one area of investigation that requires ongoing scholarly attention and scientific debate is the emotions of the Anthropocene. The emotional, mental, and psychological burdens induced by rapid and unprecedented change must be understood to better reflect the experiences of people around the globe and to initiate conversations about how emotions may be used for transformative change and effective politics. This paper aims to provide insights into the types of emotions that are emerging in Oceania as the Anthropocene unfolds. To do this, we draw on several data sets: questionnaire results with visitors of Mt Barney Lodge in the World Heritage Gondwana area in Queensland, Australia; another questionnaire with Pacific Island “experts” engaged in climate change, development, and disaster risk management work; interviews with locals living in the Cook Islands; and various spoken, written, and visual art from the Pacific. Bringing these data sets together allows us to explore a diversity of experiences, perspectives, and emotional responses to the Anthropocene from participants across Oceania. We found that acute and slow-onset weather events, experiences of direct loss and change, a perceived lack of agency or control over futures, and a sense of injustice triggered emotions including fear, stress, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness, grief, anger, frustration, helplessness, worry, but also empowerment. These results are critical for the first step of acknowledging and naming the emotions that are emerging in Oceania, such that they can then be worked through, and may be used for transformative change, effective politics, and agency over futures.