Anthropogenic activities are driving rapid changes in aquatic environments. Numerous studies suggest that climatic shifts and anomalies will convey severe consequences for ecosystems worldwide, leading to disruptions in key processes within populations including larval development, individual growth, and reproductive success. This is further exacerbated by the negative impacts on between-species interactions, and changes to biodiversity and ecosystem services (Munday et al., 2013). Understanding the responses of organisms to environmental shifts is imperative to help predict their fate on a changing planet. Particularly, the capacity of individuals and populations to cope through phenotypic plasticity and adaptation is of critical interest, with advances in genomics and epigenomics techniques helping to unveil the underlying molecular mechanisms (Eirin-Lopez and Putnam, 2019). However, major knowledge gaps remain about the adaptive potential of marine organisms to respond to future ocean conditions. The aim of this Research Topic was to bring together novel research approaches that examine acclimation and adaptation processes in marine organisms, their role in population resilience, and implications for geographical distributions and range shifts under rapid climate change. Contributions to the topic span a broad range of taxa, and investigate a diverse array of response mechanisms such as thermal safety margins (Bennett et al.), thermotolerance via endosymbionts and gene expression (Naugle et al.), tolerance via changes in allele frequencies (Knöbel et al.), local adaptation and maternal effects (Richards et al.), transgenerational plasticity (TGP; Chang et al.), environment-dependent reproductive success (Wanzenböck et al.), and phenological shifts to long-term seasonal changes (Xia et al.). Furthermore, the importance of environmental variability (not only mean changes) at different time scales, the role of developmental or life history stage in phenotypic responses, as well as future challenges for plasticity research (both within and across generations) are outlined in Bautista and Crespel.