• Cooling behaviours an area of increasing interest under rising heat in cities. • Survey of public in Fukuoka, Japan, assesses cooling behaviour and climate awareness. • Some people use air conditioning with mitigation focus, others emphasise adaptation. • Those emphasising mitigation have lower bills and more likely to engage in other behaviours. • Messaging on air conditioning use and promoting urban greening may enable co-benefits.

• Comparison of nature-based climate adaptation across subtropical Asian cities; • Dense urban form and diverse governance structures in Asian cities compared to West; • Competences as organising framework to assess policy and skills for adaptation; • Capability to link government departments and sectors of society vital; • Further research needed for normative competence under different governance forms.

This paper profiles Fukuoka City in Kyushu, Japan. We focus on the city's local climate change adaptation policies, and in particular the role of urban and greenspace planning in facilitating adaptation actions within Fukuoka. Fukuoka is a humid subtropical city which is currently experiencing significant population and economic growth. It has also made comparatively rigorous advances in climate adaptation, in a country context where local governments have been criticised for focusing more on mitigation. Fukuoka hence may yield lessons for other rapidly urbanising subtropical Asian cities. We illustrate that Fukuoka has a long tradition of science-policy connection towards the creation of a liveable urban environment. This creates a favourable research and policy infrastructure for adaptation, in particular mitigation of heat risk. This is evidenced in consideration of climate issues within the city's greenspace plans since the 1990s, and in an extensive body of underpinning applied research from local institutions into urban thermal environments in particular. Fukuoka's green terraced ACROS building has come to symbolise adaptation via the built environment, and has been followed by the emergence of further green roofs and through citizen and private sector involvement in smaller-scale greening actions. We caution that challenges remain around connecting different sections of local governments, and in maintaining climate and environmental imperatives in the face of ongoing development and expansion pressures.