Climate change is an undeniable reality and brings with it increasingly serious and complex risks for our society, economy and environment. While efforts to mitigate climate change – i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions – are already in the political discourse relatively well established, Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) is lagging significantly behind. The process of adapting to climate impacts that are already underway or expected in the future is being implemented too slowly and on an insufficient scale in most countries to avoid dangerous risks. Experts across the continent warn that the traditional, small-scale and piecemeal solutions that have worked in the past to manage extreme weather will not be enough in an era of accelerating climate change. Europe faces a critical challenge: to overcome these shortcomings, we need transformative innovations, which instead of isolated changes will bring systemic restructuring and change of entire systems, society and economy.

From the latest empirical studies carried out by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) in five different European territories (North Holland, the Finnish city of Turku, the Slovenian region of Gorenjska, the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and Iceland) leads to a clear conclusion: Europe is largely missing the opportunity to engage innovation as a key driver for effective adaptation,. Current adaptation policies in most countries are reactive, strictly sector-specific and only weakly linked to innovation ecosystems or broader socio-economic strategies. Apart from the North Netherlands, which is a significant pioneer in this area, climate adaptation in most of the monitored areas is overshadowed by mitigation efforts or is narrowed exclusively to disaster risk crisis management, which countries resort to only after extreme events such as flash floods or large-scale forest fires. However, this approach is unsustainable in the long term and extremely costly.

For countries and regions to truly transform their approaches to adaptation and build systemic resilience, eight key systemic conditions must be met. Successful transformation requires simultaneous progress in all of these areas, with failure in even one of them fundamentally undermining the overall effectiveness of adaptation strategies.

1. Increasing awareness and understanding of adaptation

The first key step is to achieve a high level of awareness of what adaptation actually means in a broader context. Analyses show that, especially among citizens, local businesses and political leaders, the topic of adaptation is permanently confused with emission mitigation or emergency rescue operations. If public understanding of the problem is reduced exclusively to disaster response, any mobilizing power for proactive and long-term solutions is lost - many efforts thus become "invisible".

2. Setting direction and strong leadership

Adaptation strategies must have the ambition to realistically phase out economically and environmentally unsustainable development models, despite their historical popularity. A clear example is the phenomenon of winter tourism in the Southern Alps: building ski resorts dependent on artificial snowmaking in periods of increasingly extreme drought drains critical water resources and makes no economic sense from a climate change perspective, but local politicians often strongly reject the changes,,,. At the national level, it is therefore essential to set measurable targets and strong political leadership, as demonstrated, for example, by the institution of the so-called Delta Commissioner in the Netherlands.

3. Deep stakeholder engagement

Real transformation requires close cooperation and a model of co-creation that goes beyond traditional institutions. While the North Netherlands has achieved great success in this field thanks to so-called „action-oriented dialogues“ and Iceland is able to engage active publics and local communities extremely effectively in mapping climate phenomena (such as glacier retreat), in most European regions there remain huge barriers to motivating ordinary companies to become part of the solution. The private sector often does not see an obvious business model in adaptation and the topic is too abstract for ordinary citizens.

4. Synergies across all sectors of public policies

Climate change affects everything – from healthcare, through innovative research and spatial planning, to agriculture and mobility. Adaptation therefore requires a so-called „whole of government“ approach to be successful, i.e. the absolutely systematic integration of these priorities into all layers of decision-making (so-called mainstreaming). However, the reality is that agendas are often isolated in ministries within their own administrative forces and interdepartmental cooperation works only minimally. A truly interdisciplinary scientific approach combining natural and behavioral sciences will also be needed to break down these barriers.

5. Effective multi-level governance models

Climate threats strike locally, and therefore the burden of responsibility in the sphere of construction and land use usually falls on local governments. However, cities and municipalities are often institutionally small and lack experts, technical capacities and resources for radical infrastructure and process innovations. The lack of mandate and powers of regional authorities to effectively coordinate local initiatives leads to bureaucratic inconsistency and fragmentation of measures across the entire territory of a given state. The Dutch multi-level model "water and soil as leaders" acts as a model system here again, where strong national guidelines form a unified system, while the implementation itself at the level of water administrations and local governments is highly targeted to the specifics of different soil types.

6. Synergies in financing adaptation policies

Building resilient regions means finding a way to sophisticatedly link European, national and regional financial instruments into effective portfolios. Direct domestic subsidy support explicitly and exclusively intended for innovative adaptation is generally absent in Europe (except for the massive Dutch Delta program with more than twenty billion euros). In other monitored European areas, strict rules that would effectively prevent the subsidy of so-called maladaptation are absent. Developing innovative cities, such as Turku in Finland, are forced to rely primarily on the artful combination and rotation of diverse European Union project grants (such as Horizon Europe, LIFE or Interreg) in order to finance any new models of urban biodiversity.

7. Space for experimentation and bold solutions

Traditional „grey engineering“, such as building huge concrete dams, is not a definitive solution for future climate change scenarios. Experts stress that we must create „living laboratories“, testbeds and safe legislative experimental environments for the search for bold and radical alternatives, such as so-called Nature-based Solutions. A leading example of innovation is the Dutch „Double Dyke“ project. This experiment responds to the extreme threat of rising sea levels by breaking with the concept of a massive defensive wall. It creates a second dyke further inland, trapping precious sediments to naturally strengthen the barrier, and testing completely innovative techniques of so-called salt farming directly in the wetland space between the two dykes. In other countries, however, test projects are sporadic, small and lack systematic ways to expand them into mainstream practice.

8. Knowledge base, monitoring and strategic capacity

Making any informed political decisions requires detailed localized data and elaborate climate scenarios. A major systemic obstacle remains the profound lack of analytical and so-called anticipatory capacities in public administration to assess what awaits a specific area and what specific steps need to be implemented. At the European level, intelligent indicators and monitoring systems are currently desperately lacking. Measurements largely focus almost exclusively on the bureaucratic and financial outputs of isolated subsidy programs, but they cannot adequately measure whether a territory has actually become more resilient through the implementation of these projects, or what the astronomical financial losses would be if the given territory had not taken action.

Despite small and encouraging signs of change – such as the French legislative push for so-called Zero Net Artificialisation to return built-up areas to their natural state and cool heat islands by 2050 – it is undeniable that our continent urgently needs a complete change of mindset. Adaptation to the new climate must no longer be seen simply as a technical necessity to avert threats, but above all as an unprecedented opportunity for a profound innovative social transformation. It combines the promotion of advanced technologies, visionary spatial planning and broad political courage.

Without the determination to apply these profound systemic changes and without significant support for innovative cooperation across society, we risk getting stuck in flawed development trajectories that will massively increase the inevitable economic damage and the toll on humanity itself.. JRi&CO2AI