Cities across Europe's climate change adaptation plans are improving, but much progress still needs to be made. This is the main conclusion of our new study published in npj Nature Urban Sustainability, in which we evaluate the latest adaptation plans of 167 European cities. In these plans, which were drawn up between 2005 and 2020, we find that overall quality has improved.

Looking at the different components of the plans, we find that cities have mostly improved in setting adaptation goals, designing thorough and diverse adaptation measures, and outlining their implementation. The Bulgarian capital Sofia and the Irish cities Galway and Dublin scored the highest for their plans.

However, there has been only a slight improvement in the monitoring of the implementation of urban plans and the involvement of civil society in the development of plans.

And while newer plans are somewhat better at designing measures that match previously identified climate risks, engaging vulnerable people and monitoring adaptation measures that aim to support them is still rare.

Here we detail a clear positive trend in urban adaptation plans in Europe – and show that there is still a long way to go towards more inclusive and robust adaptation planning to reduce climate risks.

Adaptation planning

Adaptation to the effects of climate change was a key component of the Paris Agreement of 2015, which emphasized the need to review progress on adaptation, including through regular "global assessments„.

However, given that the effectiveness of many adaptation measures only takes some time to really become apparent – often after an adverse weather event hits – it is notoriously difficult to assess this progress. To date, there is indeed no agreement on the current state of adaptation, what "progress" means, and how it should be assessed.

In our study, we examine the content of adaptation plans in order to analyze to what extent they identify climate risks and propose measures to reduce the extent of potential impacts.

To achieve this, we develop and apply three different indices to assess the quality of adaptation plans and apply them to 167 cities across Europe.

We found that these cities improved their adaptation planning skills. These improvements can occur through processes of collective learning, knowledge transfer, capacity building, transnational networks and other types of science-policy cooperation.

However, most local governments still do not consider the needs of vulnerable people, nor involve them in policy making or monitoring whether adaptation measures reduce their vulnerability to climate threats. This is something we believe is necessary for a good adaptation plan to ensure that adaptation works for the people who need it most.