If the potential capacity of private actors is high, you should consider whether the private actors are in fact adapting -- are they taking adaptation action? This constitutes an assessment of the second aspect of capacity to be considered, namely, an actor’s actual capacity. Actual capacity is defined by the adaptation undertaken by the actor. It thus includes the capacity of the actor to go through the whole adaptation learning cycle, that is the capacity to assess vulnerability and impacts, the capacity to appraise decisions, as well as the capacity to implement, monitor, evaluate and learn. Actual capacity is thus different from the potential capacity in the sense that actors might have potential capacity, in terms of financial resources and skills, but still do not act. For example, elderly people threatened by heat waves in a developed country setting may have the potential capacity to adapt through drinking more water during heat waves or buying an air-condition (see Table 2.5). The actual capacity of elderly people may be, however, much lower because of cognitive barriers related to the perceived risks, and perceived effectiveness of taking action.

Actual capacity thus includes institutional and cognitive factors, which enable and constrain potential capacity. These are called barriers to adaptation in the literature (e.g. Moser and Ekstrom, 2010). At the individual level, these barriers relate to an actor’s perceived ability to act effectively. They may further involve institutional factors, such as social norms influencing to the perceived acceptability of an action in an actor’s peer group, as described in socialpsychological theory. Protection Motivation Theory is a prominent example of this approach (Grothmann and Patt, 2005). This literature suggests that it is not sufficient to focus on the potential capacity of actors as this potential is often not realized (Adger et al., 2007). It is therefore desirable to understand barriers to adaptation action at the assessment stage, even before implementation has begun, and hence to focus on what is called here actual capacity. Even then, it is still likely that further barriers will emerge during implementation; these are discussed in the Pathfinder's section on Appraising adaptation options.

If private actors are in fact adapting then the public actor does not need to take influencing action and can directly consider monitoring and evaluating adaptation (see the Pathfinder's section on Monitoring and evaluation).