Webinar: Exploring potential adaptation options for policy and decision-makers: The Climate-ADAPT Catalogue

Adaptation options are measures and actions that can be implemented to manage climate risks to an acceptable level, taking advantage of any positive opportunities that may arise from climate change. Climate-ADAPT provides a catalogue of potential adaptation options that can be explored by climate impacts and adaptation sectors of interest. The catalogue aims at supporting policy and decision-makers, in particular at the local and regional scale, in their efforts to cope with the effects of climate change.

The adaptation options have a comprehensive structure that covers all the key aspects in the implementation cycle of adaptation and are specifically developed by the European Environment Agency with the support of the ETC-CCA (European Topic Centre on Climate Change Impacts Vulnerability and Adaptation). For most of the adaptation options, case studies showcasing measures that are already implemented or being carried out are available in Climate-ADAPT.

Climate-ADAPT adaptation options are categorized in grey, green and soft measures. Grey measures refer to technological and engineering solutions to improve adaptation of territory, infrastructures and people. Green measures are based on the ecosystem-based (or nature-based) approach and make use of the multiple services provided by natural ecosystems to improve resilience and adaptation capacity. Soft options include policy, legal, social, management and financial measures that can alter human behaviour and styles of governance, contributing to improve adaptation capacity and to increase awareness on climate change issues. These options are also categorized accordingly to the classification scheme proposed by the IPCC in its WGII AR5 report.

This Webinar aims to improve knowledge dissemination on Climate-ADAPT adaptation options and to promote their use, e.g. for: strategic policy process, awareness raising, planning, development of guidelines, etc. At the same time, the Webinar intends to discuss how this collection could be improved and better tailored to the real needs of users. Finally, the Webinar would like to stimulate participants to contribute to enriching Climate-ADAPT adaptation options and further disseminating their knowledge.