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February 16, 2025, Paper: "Central to the pursuit of sustainability is the ability of actors to navigate disruptive change so that they can survive long enough to transition to more equitable development pathways in the future (Reyers et al. 2018). But the increasing turbulence of the Anthropocene, with its unprecedented risks cascading across sectors and scales, brings with it unprecedented challenges for adaptation (Folke et al. 2016). Meeting these challenges will require building and maintaining a sustainability-focused capacity to adapt, which we take here as the ability to confront potentially disruptive change in ways that keep the system operating in pursuit of inclusive human well-being within its current regime and thus on something like its current development pathway. Such a capacity will almost certainly require addressing four separate but interrelated challenges: i) reduce sources of vulnerability particularly among the most vulnerable people and places; ii) mitigate harmful shocks and ources of disruptive change; iii) create more, and more equitable, access to the resources that people and communities need to recover from shocks and navigate future development pathways toward sustainability; and iv) strengthen adaptation-focused governance structures that help actors across levels navigate tradeoffs across both space and time that inevitably crop up in efforts to foster sustainability. This working paper provides a high-level overview of adaptation scholarship in sustainability science as well as insights from the past several decades of practice in the field. The paper is designed as a jumping off point for a seminar series on Capacity for Sustainable Development (C4SD) organized by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, the Sustainability Science Program, Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, Center for International Development, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School."