Why should we care about climate adaptation in Europe?

The climate crisis is a global issue. People, especially in some parts of the world, are feeling the impacts of the climate crisis much more intensively today than we do in Europe. But it doesn’t mean climate change is not already happening here, or worse, that we shouldn’t feel the urgency to build resilience. In 2019, a massive heatwave cost nearly four thousand lives in Europe. We talked to Fernando Diaz Lopez, lead of the Pathways2Resilience programme, about the importance of climate adaptation strategies in Europe.

“There have been a lot of changes to the climate in Europe in the past few years,” says Diaz Lopez. “The combination of periods of extreme heat and flooding is dramatic. It impacts bridges, roads, and other parts of the infrastructure. The impact on European citizens is real, and local decision-makers are starting to feel the obligation to act.”

Just last week, catastrophic floods in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region have reportedly killed at least 13 people and displaced 36 thousand, raising concerns about the country’s preparedness for extreme weather events. The same area was already hit by heavy rains and floods earlier this month, when at least two people were killed. This climate disaster follows months of drought affecting Northern Italy and the Po, the country’s largest river, which has likely contributed to the floods: after a prolonged lack of water, soils are in fact less able to absorb rainfall.

When we talk about adaptation, we tend to think about environmental loss, and how for instance water scarcity affects our agriculture and impacts food security, which it does. But the economic loss is another serious threat, explains Diaz Lopez. The European Commission estimates that climate change is responsible for about €12 billion of economic losses per year. According to the IPCC, the EU could lose up to 11 per cent of its annual GDP if we reach the worst scenario of 3 degrees of warming. Back to Italy’s case, floods caused over €1 billion in damage in 2019 in the Veneto region alone.

“Climate change has a massive impact on our social, economic and environmental systems” adds Diaz Lopez, “which is why we need to work on adapting our lives, our infrastructure, and our financing systems to the changing climate. And most of the climate adaptation action is done at the local level, directly in communities and regions.”

In other words, our current systems and ways of living – be it land and water management, or urban planning and design – have been shaped by hundreds of years of (relatively) stable climate. The unprecedent rate of change we are experiencing now is requiring us to rethink these systems, in some cases in fundamental ways.

The EU’s ambition towards climate adaptation

“The European Commission has adopted an ambitious climate adaptation strategy supported by funding through Horizon Europe, its flagship research and innovation programme. The Commission has also been putting resources into so-called ‘Missions’, in areas where there is a big ambition to achieve something that is transformational,” says Fernando Diaz Lopez.

The EU Missions aim to mobilise and activate public and private actors, such as EU Member States, regional and local authorities, research institutes, farmers and land managers, entrepreneurs and investors, to create real and lasting impact. They aim to support Europe’s transformation into a greener, healthier, more inclusive and resilient continent and will engage with citizens to boost societal uptake of new solutions and approaches.

EIT Climate-KIC is leading a consortium of organisations working on Pathways2Resilience, a project that is financed by Horizon Europe particularly to support the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change in European regions and communities.

What does it mean to become resilient, for regions and for communities?

“The European climate adaptation strategy aims to help local communities and regions to move beyond the current state of concern, emergency or risks that the climate challenge poses to them,” says Fernando Diaz Lopez. Its objectives are to make adaptation smarter, swifter and more systemic, and to step up international action.

“Today, we understand resilience as the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to cope with external events. These events can be an earthquake, like the one that recently happened in Turkey and Syria with devastating consequences, or events that come from change in climate patterns, like flooding or heat waves. So what we’re talking about here is the capacity of the systems to adapt, while the functionality of that system needs to remain.”

According to Diaz Lopez, most decision-makers now understand the need to be prepared for climate change, but what is lacking is the sharing of best practices between regions, and the testing of systemic solutions – such as adaptive management practices, nature-based and community-based interventions, and risk assessment models that take into account the cost of inactivity. These can go from improving soil cover with plants to reduce water run-off and restoring marshes and peatlands, to enhancing flood and drought forecasting and warnings, and improving communities’ trainings and preparedness in flood response.

This transformational aspect is precisely what the Pathways2Resilience project will tackle.

“We need to support decision-makers at the local and regional levels in increasing their capacity to absorb knowledge solutions, to anticipate risks, to adapt, to change and more importantly, and this is where EIT Climate-KIC’s experiences come in, the capacity to transform to a low-carbon or net-zero or beyond-net-zero carbon footprint – within the planet’s boundaries.”

The European Commission has mandated a consortium of organisations, led by EIT Climate-KIC, to work with 100 regions so that they can develop a tailored climate adaptation strategy, empowering them to carry it out in practice. The Pathways2Resilience project will launch two competitive sets of calls for proposal between now and 2024, and will distribute €21 million of funding to the selected regions. It will also support them with a number of interconnected services that will help those 100 beneficiaries (as well as fifty additional regions who can participate with their own funding) to strengthen their climate resilience.

Learn more about Pathways2Resilience