Is a more transformative approach to climate adaptation emerging in the European Union?

Europe, according to recent assessments, is warming twice as fast as other continents, and increasingly susceptible to a range of associated climate impacts. These include wildfires, drought, increased flooding and harm to human health from overheating.

Whilst these make for unsettling, indeed frightening times, adaptation to climate impacts also presents some important opportunities - to reform unhelpful, ‘maladaptive’ policies in particular sectors, address entrenched societal inequalities, and widen the range of voices involved in key decisions through which communities might re-invent themselves to better face a warming world, to name three.

Some of these opportunities were considered in the summer of 2023 at a roundtable event hosted as part of the first conference of the GreenDeal-NET network, bringing together a mix of policymakers and academic researchers.

The incremental emergence of EU adaptation policy

It is often said that the wide variety of local circumstances and challenges means that adapting to climate change is mostly a matter for regional and locally-led action, and for national governments to set conducive frameworks, regulations and incentives.

At the same time, in Europe, there are several good reasons why the EU should also play a role in adaptation policy, alongside its mitigation efforts. These range from the benefits from jointly developing scientific knowledge on current and future climate impacts to inform better decisions; the need to manage cross-border spill-overs that might result from adaptive actions (or lack thereof) of individual Member States; and the fact that effective spending of EU budgets for agriculture and regional development, and also the smooth functioning of the single market with its extensive international supply chains, may be at stake.

The need to show solidarity and prevent climate impacts weakening cohesion is also receiving increased – albeit belated – attention, as evidenced by the recent coinage by the European Commission of the term ‘just resilience’. And increasingly, the success of mitigation efforts is seen to depend on resilient carbon sinks and water supplies. The need for coordination or mutual adjustment between strategies emanating from different governance levels is also highlighted, in both policy documents and academic literature alike.

These rationales find expression in the latest adaptation strategy, adopted by the Commission in 2021 (after less formalised previous efforts), and in its moves to create more of a civil protection/ disaster-response capacity. The 2021 strategy (part of the European Green Deal) aims to make adaptation “smarter, faster and more systemic”. The 2021 European Climate Law added further support by calling explicitly for the EU and Member States to make progress on adaptation.

Reflecting IPCC terminology, EU-level discourse now includes references to the importance of ‘transformative’ adaptation – going beyond incremental adjustments, to undertake changes to more fundamental attributes of social-ecological systems, or prioritising the most vulnerable – and ‘climate resilience’, as well as climate neutrality.

Challenging policy inertia

While recent strategies have driven a certain amount of progress, a continued lack of knowledge, clear remit, political support and adequate budgeting on the part of national and sub-national policymakers continues to undermine policy implementation in many cases. Moreover, a recent analysis of municipal-level action by Diana Reckien and colleagues, presented at the Roundtable, highlights how policymaking is still too constrained by existing silos between sectors, and characterised by a lack of meaningful stakeholder involvement, especially by the most vulnerable.

One new initiative from the EU, under the auspices of the 2021 Strategy, represents a particularly significant opportunity to overcome some of these headwinds and make progress towards resilience: the EU Mission on Adaptation. At the GreenDeal-NET roundtable, Philippe Tulkens, Deputy Manager of the Mission, explained its significance and potential to support over 150 European regions and communities, between now and 2030, to develop visions of a climate-resilient future and the innovation pathways by which to reach them, testing solutions and ‘preparing the ground for deep-rooted systemic change’. Ultimately, the Mission aims to deliver 75 ‘large-scale demonstrations of systemic transformations to climate resilience across European regions and communities’, able to inspire others to follow suit. The Mission’s implementation plan makes clear that the ambition stretches significantly beyond solely technical innovation, to include social, institutional, and policy-oriented.

The Commission hopes that around EUR1 billion from the Horizon research budget will serve to ‘crowd in’ substantial further investment, both public and private. Existing institutions, or dedicated new local governance structures, are expected to steer the transformation through inclusive and deliberative processes. Particular efforts will be made to support less developed regions that may be more vulnerable to climate impacts and often lack adaptive capacity, including partnering with more advanced counterparts.

These ambitious objectives and opportunities to make progress will make the Mission a fascinating topic for governance and policy research. Indeed, Philippe Tulkens appealed for increased involvement from policy and governance researchers and social scientists more widely, to contribute directly to the development of Missions in practical ways, as well as treating them as objects of analysis.

Pointers towards a policy and governance research agenda

What sorts of research questions might we consider, then? The perhaps surprising absence of a clearer definition of resilience from the Mission’s implementation plan provides one point of departure; how will (‘just’) resilience be interpreted, and what difference might that make in terms of the outputs, outcomes and ultimate impacts in the regions and communities involved?

Secondly, will participatory pledges be delivered in practice, and in turn allow more transformative concepts to win approval – possibly in the face of inertia or opposition from key interests? Research by Diana Reckien and colleagues suggests that wide participation is more likely to deliver transformative solutions in cases of adaptation planning processes than for mitigation, but the strength of this finding could benefit from additional cases.

Thirdly, given that the Mission follows an essentially bottom-up governance model, will coordination mechanisms between the separate/ neighbouring regional initiatives be strong enough to ensure coherent outcomes across boundaries? How far will national governments be willing to incorporate emerging Mission-derived outputs in their own national adaptation planning?

Similarly, and fourthly, how far will Missions-related planning promote synergies and coherence across economic, social and environmental policy siloes, and between mitigation and adaptation strategies? And what might happen if transformative proposals emerging from the Mission areas run up against the often rather static assumptions underpinning existing environmental policies and regulations, at national and/or EU levels?

Lastly, how will private sector actors and public authorities shift the basis of their relationships to develop and deliver new visions in what looks likely to remain a relatively tight fiscal climate? The crucial importance of this factor has been stressed by Mariana Mazzucatto, the originator of the Mission concept.

These are just a few questions that might inspire social and political science-informed inquiry, findings from which could usefully guide those taking the Mission forward.

Hope, transformation and power

In these increasingly anxious times, continued and indeed increased public engagement in decision-making is seen to require the development of visions for what positive futures societies could be moving towards, not just visions of the catastrophes they are running from. This sentiment motivated many of those championing the Mission approach to climate adaptation.

But, in contrast to the commonly held view of adaptation as a ‘depoliticised’, technocratic exercise, social scientists know that these processes will be deeply political and subject to various power dynamics. Let us therefore turn our attention to the ongoing Missions experiment, for what it will tell us about the evolution of EU governance and politics. But also, as citizens, let us further consider what the academic community can contribute to shaping ‘deep-rooted systemic change’ from the Mission, and similar processes, including the kind of reforms within academia and to wider EU Horizon research priorities that might be necessary to facilitate such a contribution.

About the Author
Dr. Tim Rayner is a Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences and Tyndall Centre for Climate Research. He has published on mitigation and adaptation-related policy, and emerging debates over climate engineering and the potential for greenhouse gas removal, with a focus on the UK and EU.