Adopting an insider-outsider approach and combining multi-sited and public ethnographies, we induce a process model of occupational adaptation to climate change. We focus on first-responder occupations, following firefighters in one of the regions in the Mediterranean regions over a 14-year window (2009-2023) as they brace for three successive transitions in the fire regime. Our inductive insights reveal the critical role of first-responders as temporal workers who recognize and leverage temporal leads to futureproof expertise in anticipation of undesirable futures. Before worse comes, experts derive key contingencies by reaching out across occupational jurisdictions and rehearsing responses to next generation fires in their own. We contribute to the literature on occupational adaptation to changes in technical, social and environmental regimes, extend the emerging literature on future-making, and inform the sociology of tomorrow’s expertise.
