Social adaptive capacity is the capacity of a social system of any kind from whole societies to individuals to deal with change within their environment through adapting to it. Adaptation is the capacity to generate some appropriate response given some environmental change. A strategy of adaptation is focused on ensuring the system has a sufficient number of states to generate the appropriate one when required and ensuring the competency of these components. This question of social adaptation becomes increasingly significant when social change affects important aspects of life over comparatively short periods of time. Such changes include migration, changes in age, rapid industrial development, or major shifts of the population from rural to urban living.