ABSTRACT
Prescriptive reporting requirements under the direction of the tax and other agencies may alleviate the risk of relatively loose disclosure principles affecting the actions of company boards and executives. An inability to calculate how expectations of future earnings might be affected by climate change and other regulations, such as building design standards, confounds investors' abilities to factor such issues into their calculations. Correcting gaps in the understanding of adaptation requirements rests not just on the research effort, but also on the interpretation and presentation of scientific projections in a form that can be factored into local risk management and decision-making. Research on overcoming barriers has focused on adaptation as a process, recognising the difficulty in achieving a universally acceptable definition of what constitutes success in adaptation. Given the spatial interdependencies between Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the communities where they operate, the adaptive capacity of SMEs to climate change impacts will be vital to national adaptation efforts.
