It is widely acknowledged that promoting the long-term sustainability of rural areas requires an assessment of their capacity to handle stress from a host of external and internal factors such as resource depletion, global trading agreements, service reductions and changing demographics, to name but some. The sustainability literature includes a number of approaches for conducting capacity evaluations but is sparse regarding effective methods and empirical examples. This article provides one approach for assessing community capacity and gives results from its application to a specific Canadian rural community. The authors use general capacity variables and indicators to focus on a particular stress, namely impacts from climate change, and on one type of capacity, namely the capacity to adapt (to such climatic change). A basic framework and profiling tool (‘amoeba’) for describing the resources underlying community adaptive capacity are offered. The researchers provide a set of indicators reflecti...