Climate change is likely to exert escalating stresses on urban environments over the coming decades (Garnaut, 2008; IPCC, 2007; Stern, 2006). Urban settlements in Australia will be subject to significant vulnerability (Hennessy et al, 2007). This will prompt responses from institutional governance frameworks in Australian cities and metropolitan areas. Efforts to manage climate change effects in urban environments will require institutional change, where new rules of governance are developed and imposed by institutions in an effort to more adequately manage social stresses associated with climate change and its impacts. Operationalsing climate adaptation as a central issue of planning governance will represent a significant step in addressing climate change stresses in urban environments. Operationalisation in this instance refers to climate adaptation becoming incorporated, codified and implemented as central tenet of planning governance. This paper has three key purposes. First, it examines social scientific understandings of institutional change processes and how change occurs in response to trigger events and associated stresses. It argues that existing understandings of institutional change do not adequately reflect the fact that certain stressors have the capacity to compel institutional change, irrespective of the influence of institutional actors and institutional capacity. A new typology of stressors is presented, referred to as ‘transformative stressors.’ It is argued that when transformative stressors occur, they possess capacity to make institutional change an imperative. Second, this paper establishes a conceptual approach that understands climate change as a transformative stressor requiring institutional change within the planning frameworks of Australia’s cities and metropolitan regions. An examination of the role of planning regimes in responding to climate change as a transformative stressor through climate adaptation in urban environments follows. Third, it reports early findings from an on-going enquiry into the manner in which the metro-regional planning regime of Southeast Queensland (SEQ) has responded to climate change as a transformative stressor in an urban context.