In this year's Stories of Resilience, we bring you a crucial message from communities implementing adaptation on the ground: global and national systems are not changing fast enough in response to urgent local adaptation needs. Global and national policy makers and providers of adaptation finance "must do better" to activate transformational adaptation by creating the right enabling environments. According to the IPCC. this includes alignment of government and non-government objectives; strong bottom-up governance; social learning; phased long-term program support; and appropriate financing.