Understanding and avoiding maladaptation to climate change

This Destination contributes directly to the Strategic Plan’s Key Strategic Orientations ‘Green transition’, ‘Digital transition’ and ‘A more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe’.

In line with the Strategic Plan, the overall expected impact of this Destination is to contribute to the “Advancing science for a transition to a climate-neutral and resilient society”.

Expected impacts:

Research should contribute to closing major knowledge gaps on the changing climate together with their associated impacts and risks, on both society and nature. It should also help develop tools to support decision-makers in designing and implementing effective mitigation and adaptation actions at various time and spatial scales while properly accounting for synergies and trade-offs with other policy objectives, such as just transition, territorial cohesion and leaving no one behind.

The main impacts to be generated by topics under this Destination are:

1. Supporting climate action (both mitigation and adaptation) in Europe and globally, through advancing climate science and the knowledge base underpinning actionable solutions, to accelerate the transition to a climate-neutral, climate-resilient and prosperous society.
2. Closing key knowledge gaps related to climate change, thereby contributing substantially to key European and international assessments such as IPCC, IPBES, EUCRA, and other initiatives such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) under the World Climate Research Programme.
3. Strengthening the European Research Area on climate change by boosting scientific excellence and capacity in an inclusive manner across the participating countries.
4. Maximising synergies between mitigation and adaptation and with other policy priorities such as biodiversity and ecosystem preservation and restoration, disaster-preparedness, digitalisation, circular economy, prosperity and competitiveness, strategic autonomy, security and resilience, just transition, and the Sustainable Development Goals by exploring co-benefits, trade-offs and potential unintended consequences of climate strategies and policy interventions.

Important components of climate science research are also addressed in other Clusters -particularly Cluster 6 – which addresses the climate-ocean-cryosphere-polar nexus and the climate-energy-land-food-water-biodiversity nexus. Efforts to foster synergies and complementarities across these research activities are strongly encouraged.

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• Existing evidence on maladaptation is retrieved comprehensively, and new knowledge is generated for incorporation into main EU repositories, such as Climate-ADAPT or the portal of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change;
• The risk and adaptation assessment frameworks are improved by better integrating the maladaptation dimension;
• Guidelines and tools for maladaptation prevention and correction strategies are made available to adaptation stakeholders at relevant scales and inform the design and implementation of adaptation strategies and plans of the EU and Member States.

Scope:

Recent climate records, showing unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather events, underscore the urgent need for rapid, systemic and comprehensive adaptation to address the escalating impacts of climate change on all natural and managed systems. However, while adaptation is essential, not fully informed measures can backfire, leading to severe unintended consequences or to short-term gains that are not sustainable. In this context, maladaptation refers to adaptation actions unintentionally leading to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions or air pollutants, socio-economic, biodiversity and environmental trade-offs, increased or transferred vulnerability and greater social inequity.

Most of the adaptation plans and implemented actions are relatively recent, so even if the cases of maladaptation are increasingly documented, the evidence is still scarce and sparse, as the latest IPCC reports confirm. There is a need to learn from the increasing evidence of maladaptation across sectors and regions, both in Europe and globally, to prevent maladaptation in policy design and implementation (e.g. of the EU Adaptation Strategy).

Actions should address all the following aspects:

• Advance the understanding and identification of drivers that lead to maladaptation for a wide range of systems, socio-economic and environmental conditions. The analysis should be comprehensive and consider an integrated and systemic approach (including insights from Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to maladaptation causes and drivers of very diverse nature, such as trade-offs and feedbacks with other priorities and sectors, poor decision making and implementation practices and the inherent uncertainty and other features of the adaptation process). The analysis should also integrate the perspectives of public and private stakeholders and end-users, apply intersectional approach and include data disaggregated by gender, where relevant and feasible.
• Map and analyse evidence to identify and validate effective adaptation practices that prevent maladaptation and help to identify maladaptive ones. Case studies should be used for this purpose, for monitoring and evaluation of the adaptation measures, policies, and actions at a local, regional, and national scale, and from regions and sectors with diverse characteristics and environmental conditions. Engagement of end-users is encouraged to ensure robust and realistic characterisation of maladaptation experiences. Among other sources, integrating evidence from and for the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change is encouraged. Evidence and insights gained should be systematized and incorporated into main EU repositories.
• Strengthen the methodological and analytical toolbox for complex climate risk and adaptation assessments to increase public understanding and policy awareness of maladaptation risks, and to advance both qualitative and quantitative understanding of the most important complex risk feedbacks, particularly when they may result in significant constraints on options for climate action.
• Study and propose corrective responses for the identified maladaptation cases and provide systematised prevention guidelines and best practice examples to avoid maladaptive outcomes.

Coordination and collaboration with most relevant on-going projects from Mission Adaptation, Cluster 5 Destination 1 “Climate Science and Responses" and from relevant Destinations from other Clusters is encouraged, especially for evidence retrieval, national scale assessment and methodological consistency. Specific resources should be devoted to this purpose and project scientific boards should cross-fertilised. Actions’ results should also contribute to future European Climate Risk Assessments.