Climate change adaptation guidance: Clarifying three modes of planning and implementation

•Diverse climate adaptation guides continue to emerge, but with many commonalities.•Six core steps should be the foundation to an adaptation cycle in any guide.•Practitioners apply these to many contexts, but guides are poor at explaining how.•Three archetypal modes of adaptation cycle are Scan, Portfolio and Project analyses.•Future guides should explain how to enact (at least) these three modes of adaptation planning.