Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern. While there is a plethora of research on climate adaptation, the literature is highly fragmented, and empirical studies are rarely carried out with global samples. This lack of comparative work limits our ability to understand general patterns in how societies adapt, thereby impeding effective policy and practice at a wider scale. To fill this gap, we outline a global comparative approach to the study of hazards that uses ethnographic data. The approach operationalizes five ecological dimensions of environmental hazards, including event type, frequency, onset speed, predictability, and severity, and investigates how they relate across a world-wide sample of 132 nonindustrial societies with significant variation in time and space. We then utilize this approach to explore how specific ecological dimensions might influence the adaptive capacity of societies to respond to events. Findings uncover generalizable patterns that exist across our global sample, suggesting that predictability enhances adaptive capacity, while temporal factors that promote uncertainty (including slow onset speed, longer event duration, and unpredictability) limit the success of adaptation efforts.