Adaptation pathways is a concept that is rapidly emerging from theory and starting to be applied more regularly in practice. While few published methods exist, practitioners are developing new approaches to incorporating adaptation pathways into adaptation plans within sectors like Local Government and NRM. Adaptation pathways are attracting interest for a variety of reasons: they provide clear communication about the need to sequence adaptation options, consider thresholds in planning, distinguish between incremental and transformational change and the need to identify where preparatory work is required for actions that may have a long lead time. This paper describes the strengths of pathways based planning compared to traditional approaches and presents a method that has been applied in two regional plans in South Australia: the Eyre Peninsula and Metropolitan Southern Adelaide. The paper also summarises the next steps in developing applied adaptation pathways methodologies.