There are still challenges in sharing the message about how countries in the world can adapt to a warming world, an Australia senior scientist said on Thursday.

But Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Professor Andrew Ash said he hoped the high- level gathering, which attracted almost 1,000 delegates, including 300 experts from overseas, would help change that.

"A number of them are very high profile international delegates who are well connected into policy areas within their own countries, so I think this conference will have a significant impact globally," Ash said in the co-convenor of a major climate adaptation conference, which wrapped up in Australia on Thursday.

"We've still got a long way to go in being effectively able to communicate to communities, to industries and to governments about climate change and the ways forward in adaptation.

"We also still need to build the capacity of people to be able to adapt to climate change, and that's a major outcome of this conference.

"A lot of that adaptive capacity needs to occur at local levels. So we need to develop pathways and approaches to supporting and resourcing communities and local governments appropriately to deal with the impacts of climate change."

Ash said the Climate Adaptation Futures conference also showed a lot of things were being done globally to help people adapt, as climate change makes its presence felt.

"But we still need to be thinking about some more of the transformational changes that are needed for the future.

"We have a small window of opportunity to start bringing in things like planning of infrastructure that might be exposed to climate change in the future.

"We need to do that planning now, but some changes can wait until climate change impacts are closer to us and we can respond to those where and when it's needed."