Foreign publications - 2013
Extreme Weather Events in Europe: Preparing for Climate Change Adaptation
This report from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and EASAC (European Academies Science Advisory Council) is focused on providing a working-level assessment of the current state of the quantitative understanding of relevant extreme weather phenomena and their impacts.
Balancing the future of Europes coasts - EEA report
The objective of this report is to frame an analytical approach for coastal areas in Europe, and to place this in the context of the new socio‑economic drivers of sustainable growth, and the formation of a new integrated policy framework. This framework builds on an ecosystem‑based management approach and integrated spatial planning and management. The report presents some key sustainability challenges for European coastal areas and waters, and highlights the need for a consolidated knowledge base and widespread information‑sharing to support informed policy development and management actions.
Water and Climate Change Adaptation: Policies to navigate uncharted waters.
This report from the OECD provides guidance to policy makers to help improve the prioritisation, efficiency, timeliness and equity of their policy responses. The report sets out a risk-based approach for adapting to climate change that promotes water security.
Guidelines on Climate Change and Natura 2000 - Dealing with the impact of climate change on the management of the Natura 2000 network of areas of high biodiversity value
These guidelines are primarily aimed at Natura 2000 site managers and policy makers. The purpose is to underline benefits from Natura 2000 sites in mitigating the impacts of climate change, reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, and how adaptation of management for species and habitats protected by Natura 2000 can be used to tackle the effects of climate change.
Managing the land in a changing climate, Adaptation Sub-Committee Progress Report 2013
This UK report reviews some of the key ecosystem services provided by the land.
Specifically, the report addresses the use of land to continue to deliver important goods and services in the face of a changing climate - supplying food and timber, providing habitat for wildlife, storing carbon in the soil, and coping with sea level rise on the coast.
NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency: A stronger, more resilient New York.
This is New York city's comprehensive strategy for climate change adaptation. It contains a mix of hard and soft actionable recommendations both for rebuilding the communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy and increasing the resilience of infrastructure and buildings citywide against the impact of severe storms.
Climate change and health: a tool for estimating health and adaptation costs, World Health Organization 2013
The World Health Organisation has published a report to help national policy-makers in Europe to assess the costs of health and adaptation. 'Climate change and health: a tool to estimate health and adaptation costs' provides guidance on assessing the costs of the health impacts of climate change and also the costs and benefits of adaptation to avoid or minimise these impacts.
Adaptative Response Framework (EPA - United States Environmental Protection Agency)
Climate change impacts pose challenges to the water sector's ability to fulill its public health and environmental missions. Extreme weather events, sea-level rise,
temperature changes, and shifting precipitation and runof patterns may result in changes to water quality and availability. Uncertainty in climate change projections and diiculty in connecting these changes to local impacts poses a complex set of challenges to utilities. Increased understanding of these factors has signiicant implications for the resilience of the water sector.
EPA's Climate Ready Water Utilities (CRWU) initiative provides resources for the water sector to adapt to climate change by promoting a clear understanding of climate science and adaptation options and by promoting consideration of integrated water resources management planning in the water sector. If you have not yet incorporated climate change into your utility's decisionmaking processes, it may seem daunting. But climate change can be integrated into existing practices such as
asset management, efective utility management, water supply and demand planning, capacity building, security, and emergency preparedness. Capitalizing on these connections makes climate planning more manageable and approachable.
Adaptation Strategies Guide for Water Utilities (EPA - United States Environmental Protection Agency)
Climate change presents several challenges to drinking water and wastewater utilities, including increased frequency and duration of droughts, loods associated with intense precipitation events and coastal storms, degraded water quality, wildires and coastal erosion, and subsequent changes in demand for services.
While these impacts have been documented in numerous publications, inding the right information for your type of utility or geographic region can be diicult and sometimes overwhelming. Therefore, the goals of the Adaptation Strategies Guide are (1) to provide drinking water and wastewater utilities with a basic understanding of how climate change can impact utility operations and missions, and (2) to provide examples of actions utilities can take (i.e., adaptation options) to prepare for these impacts.
Adaptation in Europe - Addressing risks and opportunities from climate change in the context of socio-economic developments
This report provides policymakers across Europe, at different levels of governance and stages of policy formulation, with information that can be used to support adaptation planning and implementation. Specific parts of the report are therefore targeted at different audiences.
National Adaptation Planning: Lessons from OECD Countries 2013), OECD Environment, Working Papers, No. 54, OECD Publishing.
This paper provides an overview of national adaptation planning activity across OECD countries and identifies some of the emerging lessons that have been learnt from their experiences.
It finds that countries and local governments have made significant investments in building capacity and new knowledge to support adaptation and identifies key challenges faced as they have started to implement their strategies and plans.
Circle 2 - Climate adaptation research
The "Preliminary Findings and Key Questions" report provides insight into the Climate Adaptation research landscape across a larger Europe and raises key questions that are relevant to fully understand the complex mosaic of adaptation research in Europe.
Adaptation to climate change - are governments prepared?
A cooperative audit
The cooperative audit indicates that governments are not sufficiently prepared for the expected impacts of climate change and do not have adequate actions in place to deal with these unavoidable negative effects. This cooperative audit is based on eight individual national audit reports from Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia and Ukraine, and a factfinding study by the European Court of Auditors.
Generally the national audits revealed that the countries assessed in this report are in an early stage in adapting to climate change. So far, adaptation activities are related to identifying risk and vulnerabilities and to some extent policy development.
Actions identified in the national audits covered in this report are mainly a response to current challenges and not initiated due to anticipated medium-term and long-term climate change impacts.
Based on this the report puts forward a series of recomendations intended for national and regional planning and action.