To catalyse action for both mitigation and adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, improved understanding of synergies and trade-offs induced by differential governance interventions in earth system dynamics is needed at multiple scales – local to national and global. This chapter applies a social-ecological systems (SES) analytical approach and a novel interdisciplinary integrative framework for trade-off analysis embedded within an SES approach to analyse cross-scale impacts of three specific UNFCCC-mediated policy mechanisms aimed at mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change:Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Clean Development Mechanism, and the Adaptation Fund. Evidence from published studies is presented to identify synergies and trade-offs among mitigation and adaptation impacts of these policy mechanisms. It is argued that the SES approach may provide a scalable, replicable, and integrative analytical approach to rigorously analyse the synergies and trade-offs of different global to local policy mechanisms and their feedback effects from local to global scales.