On Wednesday 24 February, the European Commission adopted its new strategy for adaptation to climate change, which primarily aims to strengthen the EU’s action on the international stage compared to the previous strategy dating from 2013.
“Our climate change adaptation ambition must match our global leadership in climate change mitigation”, says the strategy, which aims to make the EU resilient to the inevitable impacts of climate change by 2050.
And the Commission's Executive Vice-President in charge of the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, said: “What is completely new is that we are now focusing on the international aspect. We didn't do this in 2013”.
The EU will, for example, include climate resilience and preparedness into relevant EU external action policies and instruments, the strategy says.
The Commission also intends to step up support for the development and implementation of national adaptation plans in the EU’s partner countries, as is the case for individual EU Member States.
Stressing the need to increase international funding for climate change adaptation, the institution intends to use EU instruments for external action, such as the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+), and to attract private sector investment.
Nevertheless, the strategy does not “clarify how exactly it will unlock barriers to accessing finance for the most vulnerable communities”, for climate change adaptation, lamented the NGO network CAN Europe, while advocating funding based on grants rather than loans.
Strengthening knowledge and data
Another major objective of the strategy is “to push the frontiers of adaptation knowledge”, and to “acquire more and better data”, in particular on economic losses due to extreme climate-related events (floods, droughts...).
According to the commission, these losses in the EU already average more than €12 billion a year and could exceed €170 billion each year if the current European economy were to be exposed to a global warming of 3°C compared to pre-industrial levels.
In particular, the institution wants to make the ‘Climate-ADAPT’ programme the authoritative European knowledge platform on climate-related impacts and adaptation.
As part of this programme, it intends to create “a European climate and health observatory”.
The latter “will look at the direct impact of hot and cold extremes and what it means for the spread of new diseases”, while Covid-19 “has been a stark reminder that insufficient preparation can have dire consequences”, Timmermans said.
A more systemic adaptation
To make climate change adaptation more systemic, the Commission also intends to support policy development at all levels of governance and in all sectors of society.
This will be achieved by improving national adaptation strategies and plans, integrating climate resilience principles into macro-budgetary policy and promoting nature-based and local-level adaptation solutions.
“Nature-based solutions are always the best solutions”, said the Vice President.
Welcoming this move towards more systemic adaptation policies, CAN Europe nevertheless felt that the strategy should have gone further by at least providing for the development of binding adaptation plans, climate vulnerability assessments and climate ‘stress tests’ at the local, regional and national levels.
Asked about the possibility of financing only infrastructure that is deemed capable of coping with the impacts of climate change in order to avoid investing European public money in unsuitable projects, Mr Timmermans said he would prefer a “positive” approach rather than one of “sanctions”. One should always however have “adaptation in mind” regardless of the EU instrument used to fund a project, he said.
See the strategy: https://bit.ly/2NVsYDQ (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)