2 research outputs found
Adapting to change: Time for climate resilience and a new adaptation strategy. EPC Issue Paper 5 March 2020
The dramatic effects of climate change are being felt across the European continent and the world. Considering how sluggish and unsuccessful the world has been in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the impacts will become long-lasting scars. Even implementing radical climate mitigation now would be insufficient in addressing the economic, societal and environmental implications of climate change, which are expected to only intensify in the years to come.
This means climate mitigation must go hand in hand with the adaptation efforts recognised in the Paris Agreement. And although the damages of climate change are usually localised and adaptation measures often depend on local specificities, given the interconnections between ecosystems, people and economies in a globalised world there are strong reasons for European Union (EU) member states to join forces, pool risk and cooperate across borders. Sharing information, good practices, experiences and resources to strengthen resilience and enhance adaptive capacity makes sense economically, environmentally and socially.
The European Commissionâs 2013 Adaptation Strategy is the first attempt to set EU-wide adaptation and climate resilience and could be considered novel in that it tried to mainstream adaptation goals into relevant legislation, instruments and funds. It was not very proactive, however. It also lacked long-term perspective, failed to put the adaptation file high on the political agenda, was under resourced, and suffered from knowledge gaps and silo thinking.
The Commissionâs European Green Deal proposal, which has been presented as a major step forward to the goal of Europe becoming the worldâs first climate-neutral continent, suggests that the Commission will adopt a new EU strategy on adaptation to climate within the first two years of its mandate (2020-2021). In light of the
risks climate change poses to ecosystems, societies and the economy (through inter alia the vulnerability of the supply chain to climate change and its potential failure to provide services to consumers), adaptation should take a prominent role alongside mitigation in the EUâs political climate agenda.
Respecting the division of treaty competences, there are important areas where EU-wide action and support could foster the continentâs resilience to climate change. The European Policy Centre (EPC) project âBuilding a climate-resilient Europeâ, which has culminated in this Issue Paper, has identified the following: (i) the ability to convert science-based knowledge into preventive action and responsible behaviour, thus filling the information gap; (ii) the need to close the protection gap through better risk management and risk sharing; (iii) the necessity to adopt nature-based infrastructural solutions widely and tackle the grey infrastructure bias; and (iv) the need to address the funding and investment gap.
This Issue Paper aims to help inform the upcoming EU Adaptation Strategy and, by extension, strengthen the EUâs resilience to climate change. To that end, the authors make a call for the EU to mainstream adaptation and shift its focus from reacting to disasters to a more proactive approach that prioritises prevention, risk reduction and resilience building. In doing so, the EU must ensure fairness and distributive justice while striving for climate change mitigation and protecting the environment and biodiversity.
To succeed, the new EU Adaptation Strategy will need to address specific challenges related to the information, protection, funding and investment gaps; and the grey infrastructure bias. To tackle and address those challenges, this Paper proposes 17 solutions outlined in Table 1 (see page 6)
Addressing the âArctic Paradoxâ: Environmental Policy Integration in the European Unionâs Emerging Arctic Policy. EU Diplomacy Paper 03/2018
The Arctic has increasingly become the subject of strategic debates, prompting
numerous actors â including the European Union (EU) â to develop Arctic strategies.
Importantly, these strategies need to address the âArctic paradoxâ, that is, the trade-off between pursuing the economic opportunities arising from an increasingly ice-free
Arctic and preventing environmental degradation in a region of central importance
for the global climate. This paper investigates how the EU has positioned itself in this
respect by asking to what extent its emerging Arctic policy has integrated
environmental concerns. To do so, it initially conducts a discourse analysis of Arctic
strategies of the EU institutions, Arctic and major non-Arctic EU member states. It finds
that these three groups each form a âdiscourse coalitionâ advocating for strong, weak
and moderate environmental policy integration (EPI) in the EUâs Arctic policy
respectively. A probe into the Arctic policy practice of typical representatives of these
coalitions shows that a multi-level pattern exists which combines an EU-level pro-EPI
discourse and action and varying member state-level commitments to EPI. The paper
concludes by arguing that the Arctic policy at the EU level is currently âgreen by
omissionââ avoiding contentious subjects in the discourse as well as in actions â and
discusses the implications of this finding