The research, published in PLOS Climate by Emma L. Yule, Joana Avi-Lorie, Pamela Candea, James Porter, and Francesca Vantaggiato, examines how Scotland’s third National Adaptation Plan, known as SNAP3, pursues a key outcome of communities creating climate resilient places. The authors point out that clear adaptation outcomes are essential for driving climate action and assessing progress, yet developing a shared vision of desirable adaptation outcomes—and the steps needed to achieve them—requires something that policy documents alone rarely deliver: a shared understanding of what constitutes a well-adapted place and what resources communities need to create and implement such visions.

To probe that gap, the team organized a collaborative workshop that used storytelling techniques to co-produce adaptation visions. Rather than asking participants to rank priorities on a checklist or respond to a survey, the facilitators invited them to develop a shared narrative about their place and its climate future, and then to identify turning points—concrete moments of change where the story could bend toward resilience. Participants included community groups, public sector representatives, and government officials, creating an unusual space where the people who write adaptation policy sat alongside the people who must live with its consequences.

The storytelling approach is more than a facilitation gimmick. In adaptation research, narratives serve as a mechanism for surfacing values that conventional planning processes often obscure. When a community member describes a flood from memory, or a planner describes a drainage upgrade in technical terms, the two accounts reveal different assumptions about risk, responsibility, and belonging. By weaving these accounts into a single shared narrative, the workshop method forced participants to negotiate what a desirable future actually meant—and, crucially, to identify the specific shifts that would be required to get there.

Three key turning points emerged from the exercise. The first was a shift in governance structures toward the inclusion of local communities in developing adaptation visions. Participants recognized that top-down adaptation planning, however well intentioned, tends to produce outcomes that feel imposed rather than owned. The second was consistent knowledge-sharing across scales, supported by dedicated platforms and procedures, so that lessons learned in one community or one administrative level do not remain trapped there. The third was enhanced communication and engagement around adaptation narratives at the local level, ensuring that the story of a place’s climate future is told in language that resonates with the people who inhabit it.

The authors are blunt about the stakes. Unless these measures are implemented, they conclude, communities will struggle to create the climate-resilient places envisioned in SNAP3. That warning carries particular weight because Scotland’s national adaptation framework explicitly names community-led resilience as a central outcome. If the governance structures, knowledge platforms, and local engagement practices needed to realize that outcome remain absent, the plan’s most ambitious goal risks becoming an aspiration without a mechanism—a vision statement disconnected from the capacity of actual places to change.

The study also delivers a nuanced verdict on one of the most popular tools in contemporary climate policy: local adaptation targets. Participants perceived such targets as potentially useful drivers of adaptation action, giving communities concrete benchmarks and a sense of accountability. But the researchers identified real limitations to their effectiveness. Adaptation targets, they found, risk becoming siloed—treated as stand-alone metrics that fail to integrate broader resilience goals or the wider priorities of the communities they are meant to serve. A target to plant trees along a riverbank, for example, may satisfy a numeric goal while ignoring flood dynamics, biodiversity needs, or local land-use conflicts.

That tension between the positive and negative narratives around local adaptation targets leads the authors to a careful recommendation: continuous monitoring and a cautious, place-based approach to their implementation. In other words, targets should not be abandoned, but neither should they be treated as self-executing. Their value depends on whether they remain tethered to the lived priorities of specific places, and on whether monitoring systems can detect when a target has drifted from its original purpose. This finding resonates with a broader debate in adaptation science about the difference between measurable outputs and genuine resilience, which is often invisible until a hazard arrives to test it.

Methodologically, the research illustrates the growing field of co-production, in which knowledge is generated jointly by researchers, practitioners, and community members rather than extracted from communities by outside experts. Co-produced visions carry a distinctive form of legitimacy: because participants authored the narrative themselves, the turning points they identified are not external prescriptions but commitments they recognize as their own. The workshop format also equalized expertise in an important way. A government official’s knowledge of funding streams and a resident’s knowledge of which streets flood first are both forms of evidence, and the storytelling frame allowed both to enter the record on equal footing.

The implications extend well beyond Scotland. National adaptation plans are proliferating worldwide as climate impacts intensify, and most of them face the same structural problem this study exposes: the distance between a national outcome and a local reality. The Scottish findings suggest that closing that distance requires deliberate infrastructure—governance reforms that share power, platforms that move knowledge across scales, and communication practices that keep adaptation narratives alive in everyday civic life. They also suggest that the humble tools of narrative and imagination deserve a place alongside risk models and cost-benefit analyses in the adaptation toolkit. A community that can tell a coherent story about its climate future, and identify the turning points where that story can change course, may be better equipped to act than one armed only with a spreadsheet of targets. As climate pressures mount, the study’s central message is deceptively simple: well-adapted places are not just built, they are imagined, narrated, and negotiated—and the turning points that make them possible must be named before they can be reached.

Subject of Research: Co-producing climate change adaptation visions and pathways through community storytelling in Scotland

Article Title: Turning points in climate change adaptation: Storytelling and co-producing visions and pathways for creating well-adapted places

Article References: Yule, E. L., Avi-Lorie, J., Candea, P., Porter, J., & Vantaggiato, F. (2026). Turning points in climate change adaptation: Storytelling and co-producing visions and pathways for creating well-adapted places. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001056. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001056

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001056

Keywords: climate adaptation, storytelling, co-production, community resilience, Scotland, SNAP3, adaptation targets, governance, knowledge-sharing, place-based planning, PLOS Climate, turning points

The research team, led by Shiv Ayappa together with Divya Manikandan, Katharine Press Callahan, Travis N. Rieder, Michael Fingerhood, and Margaret S. Chisolm, conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 participants who were in recovery from opioid use disorder. The interviews focused specifically on whether participants had experienced a “rock bottom,” what those experiences were like, and whether they had actually propelled the participants toward recovery. Two members of the study team independently coded each interview transcript using an inductive thematic analysis approach, resolving discrepancies through discussion and consensus before consolidating their findings into a final codebook — a method designed to let themes emerge from the data rather than imposing preconceived categories on it.

The headline finding is striking in its simplicity. Seventy percent of participants — 14 of the 20 interviewed — reported having experienced something they would describe as rock bottom. Yet only 10 percent, just two participants, said that a rock bottom experience actually motivated them toward recovery. In other words, the overwhelming majority of people who reached the kind of devastating low point that popular wisdom treats as a catalyst did not find in it any push toward change. The floor they hit was not a springboard; it was simply more suffering.

The researchers did not stop at counting. Their analysis identified four recurring themes that characterized rock bottom experiences: loss of social connection, character erosion, loss of resources, and a loss of the will to live. Participants described becoming isolated from family and friends, watching their sense of moral identity disintegrate, exhausting their financial and material supports, and in the most severe cases arriving at a state in which life no longer felt worth living. These are not the ingredients of motivation. They are the ingredients of despair — and despair, the study suggests, tends to entrench addiction rather than dissolve it.

Where, then, does the motivation to recover actually come from? For 85 percent of participants — 17 of the 20 — the answer lay in what the researchers call “turning points”: discrete events that redirected the trajectory of a life. Three themes dominated these turning points: parenthood, near-death experiences, and incarceration. Becoming a parent, or facing the prospect of losing a child, gave many participants a future worth protecting. Surviving an overdose or another brush with death confronted them with the fragility of the life they wanted back. And incarceration, whatever its harms, imposed a forced pause that some participants used to reorient. Crucially, these turning points differ from rock bottom in a fundamental way: they point toward something, rather than merely documenting everything a person has lost.

That distinction has profound clinical implications. If rock bottom is not a motivator, then the widespread advice to “let them hit bottom” — the instinct of families, and sometimes of clinicians, to withhold help until a person’s life collapses completely — has no empirical footing. The authors note that the idea of rock bottom may be stigmatizing, framing people with addiction as people who must be broken before they can be fixed, and that it may hinder timely support for addiction. In a period when opioid use disorder remains a major public health crisis and physician workforce shortages already hamper the treatment response, waiting for an imaginary floor is a luxury that individuals, families, and health systems cannot afford.

The study’s most conceptually ambitious move is its connection to the idea of human flourishing. The four themes of rock bottom — lost connection, eroded character, lost resources, and lost will to live — map with striking precision onto the domains that flourishing researchers, including the Harvard-based Global Flourishing Study, use to describe a life going well: close social relationships, character and virtue, material and financial stability, and a sense of meaning and purpose. Rock bottom, in this framing, is not a mysterious psychological event but the systematic collapse of the very domains that make human life flourish. The researchers suggest that the promotion of human flourishing may therefore lead to sustained recovery — a reframing that shifts the clinical question from “how bad must it get?” to “what does this person need to build a life worth staying sober for?”

The findings on what sustains recovery reinforce this reframing. When the researchers examined the factors critical to maintaining recovery over time, two themes emerged: rebuilding social connection and character growth. Participants who stayed in recovery described reweaving relationships, repairing their sense of who they were, and growing into people they could respect. This aligns with a substantial body of prior research on recovery capital — the internal and external resources a person can draw on to initiate and maintain recovery — which has repeatedly linked social networks and identity reconstruction to long-term outcomes. It also echoes earlier qualitative work showing that people who recover, whether through treatment or on their own, typically describe a shift in identity rather than a single moment of surrender.

None of this means that moments of crisis are irrelevant. Near-death experiences, after all, were among the most common turning points, and a growing literature on “hitting bottom” in alcohol use disorder has attempted to operationalize the construct precisely because people do describe such moments. What the Johns Hopkins study clarifies is the direction of the causal arrow. Crisis alone does not generate change; change is generated when crisis is joined to hope, connection, and a plausible future. A near-death experience motivates when there is something on the other side of survival — a child, a relationship, a self worth becoming. Pure degradation, unaccompanied by any of these, tends only to deepen the spiral.

The study has limitations inherent to its design. Twenty participants, all currently in recovery, cannot represent the full population of people with opioid use disorder, including those who died before reaching recovery or who never entered it. Qualitative thematic analysis, however rigorous, is interpretive by nature. Yet the consistency of the themes, the careful dual-coding process, and the convergence with decades of recovery research give the findings considerable weight. And the practical message is urgent: rather than waiting for people with opioid addiction to lose everything, clinicians, families, and policymakers should be working to strengthen the very things addiction destroys — relationships, character, resources, and hope. Recovery, this research suggests, begins not at the bottom, but at the first glimpse of a flourishing life.

Subject of Research: Rock bottom experiences and turning points in recovery from opioid use disorder and their relationship to human flourishing

Article Title: Rock Bottom Is Not a Motivator: From Opioid Addiction to Human Flourishing

Article References: Rock Bottom Is Not a Motivator: From Opioid Addiction to Human Flourishing. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10848-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10848-y

Keywords: opioid use disorder, rock bottom, addiction recovery, turning points, human flourishing, qualitative research, motivation, recovery capital, stigma, social connection, Johns Hopkins, Journal of General Internal Medicine