Climate adaptation efforts are faced with the challenges of dealing with large unprecedented changes to ecosystems, socio-economic activities, and individual and social values. Such changes mean the decision context will be characterised with multiple distributed decision makers, ambiguous goals, and uncertainties that cannot be resolved with more research. This requires fundamental shifts in future provisioning and use of ecosystem services. Adaptation pathways can help stakeholders diagnose and frame these contested issues and incorporate into decision making pre-conditions (i.e., options) and principles for adaptive learning. For adaptation pathways to be effective requires understanding the links between ecosystem processes and wellbeing under climate change. Many ecosystems have the ability to adapt and transform with climate change and therefore provide benefits to people in the form of options and insurance values, which increase peoples’ adaptive capacity. These benefits are called adaptation services, but remain under-recognised in research and decision-making. Numerous urgent research and policy issues are raised by this knowledge gap. Overcoming these issues will challenge societal systems of values, rules, and knowledge (vrk) that determine goals, research priorities, management paradigms, and decision processes. For example, contemporary planning and investment decision making assume human preferences/values are known and stable, but under climate change people will have to change livelihoods to new environments with novel ecosystems. Future values will be dynamic or unknown. Fundamental assumptions and approaches underpinning all planning, investment and R&D practices will need rethinking. Systemic challenges to societal vrk under environmental change such as these are explored in this talk.