Recent advances in climate change risk assessment and management and their application across cities, coastal zones, and finance highlight promising opportunities for near-term action to better govern complex climate change risk and advance adaptation implementation. Positioning applications of participatory modeling, climate risk assessment, adaptation pathways planning, and systemic fiscal disaster risk modeling across variations in time, space, and sector, examples point towards more actionable insights and governance conditions to accelerate equitable adaptation and address inaction caused by uncertainty and complexity.