<p>Natural resource professionals are on the front lines of climate change and uniquely situated to understand the lands where they work. Analyzing the impacts of learning tools designed to build adaptive capacity within the natural resource management field can offer insights into an enabling environment for climate change adaptation. Through interviews with 35 professionals across multiple landownerships and disciplines (e.g. forestry, habitat restoration, wildlife specialists), we identified the conditions that professionals believe enhance or hinder their ability to apply lessons from the Climate Change Response Framework’s Adaptation Planning and Practices courses to their local contexts. We aligned our findings with the adaptation conditions from Working Group II’s contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report and a framework on innovation in environmental governance to assess whether current framings of conditions capture the range of variables that affect adaptation in natural resource management. By drawing on practitioners’ experiences to better understand the factors influencing sub-national governments and non-governmental voluntary actors, we aim to stimulate further discussion on researching and establishing an enabling environment for adaptation in natural resource management. Key takeaways include natural resource practitioners recognizing their role in enhancing the framing and legitimacy of specific adaptation actions to improve public receptivity. We also underscore the importance of operational activities as entry points for understanding adaptation challenges, as well as directives for future research, such as exploring better methods to improve financial and timely informational support for adaptation in the sector.</p>