This critical step in the climate adaptation journey involves co-developing a shared vision with stakeholders. Active engagement is essential for creating commitment and ownership of the process and vision. This co-created vision will be a tool for mobilizing change and holding regional stakeholders accountable. It must be holistic, combining scientific insights with community priorities to foster a sustainable and equitable future. Adaptation strategies should prioritize the most vulnerable populations, ensuring social equity. Leveraging traditional knowledge and modern technology, the vision aims for proactive resilience through robust infrastructure, diversified economies, and resilient agriculture. It also encourages innovation to reduce the carbon footprint and enhance adaptive capacity. Public-private partnerships will be key to mobilizing resources and driving large-scale innovation. Ultimately, the vision must be dynamic, evolving with climate changes and lessons learned, and calls for courage, collaboration, and commitment from all sectors to protect our planet for future generations.

Pathways for climate adaptation and resilience gather interventions across multiple levers of change in a portfolio of actions, each of them contributing to progress towards the desired pathway. Pathways ensure efforts align with overarching shared vision and activities, output and outcomes are prioritized and sequenced over time, and the overall process is rooted in a theory of change that delineates how and why the desired transformation occurs. Therefore, they should entail clear plans and commitments that guide and enable the innovation and policy actions.