What leads to equitable adaptation intentions in city practitioners?

Extreme events impact communities worldwide and it is likely that this impact will worsen. Preparing, responding, and adapting to extreme climate event impact is essential to reduce harm, and understanding the motivational factors driving adaptation behavior is crucial. Despite increasing awareness of the disproportionate and inequitable impact of these events on underserved communities and their prolonged recovery periods, empirical studies focusing on equitable adaptation behavior remain scarce. While previous research has primarily assessed adaptation behavior at the household level, there is less scholarship focusing on the other scales of decision-making that affect household capacity to adapt. This is especially the case regarding the association between motivational factors and city level practitioners’ adaptation behaviors and the impact of these behaviors on equitable adaptation. In this context, a necessary step to explore this relationship is understanding city practitioners’ adaptation intentions and behavior. In this study, we employed data collected from 2019-2023 from 46 cities who participated in an engaged research project in the US Gulf Coast region from 2019-2021 to better understand how the introduction of vulnerability discussions during the co-production of new knowledge may have influenced these practitioners’ intentions and behavior towards adaptation, especially concerning equitable outcomes. We advance a new conceptual framework – the Equitable Adaptation Model (EAM) – to explore the relationship between motivational factors and equitable adaptation intentions in city practitioners and we investigate whether discussing social vulnerability influences city practitioners' intentions to engage in equitable adaptation actions. We find a positive association between equitable adaptation intentions and perceived risk and perceived adaptation. We also find that introducing social vulnerability content during engagement positively affects city practitioners’ intentions to pursue equitable adaptation actions.