Presentation
Building on a literature review and a set of interviews conducted with experts, practitioners and policymakers working at Member State and European Union levels. this Policy Brief aims at identifying the role an EU Framework for Resilience can play in supporting its planning at EU level and across MS. Ultimately, it is intended to feed the European Commission’s current effort to draft a proposal for this framework, and to show its relevance, as a necessary tool to answer critical concerns within a broad set of policy domains, to stakeholders outside the climate sphere.
Key Messages
- The need for increased resilience to climate risks in the European Union is calling both for urgent action, and increased political attention to answer growing concerns, such as ensuring the resilience of economic activities and prosperity, people’s safety, and insurability. The expectations towards the future Integrated Framework on Climate Resilience are not limited to its content but also relate to the uptake of these issues it can trigger within MS and EU policy sectors. This is essential to shift from a reactive response to climate impacts to one that anticipates the risks and builds preparedness, to avoid suffering from increased losses and damages within all segments of society. Therefore, the capacity to mobilize beyond the climate community to get a real political endorsement within sectors and countries is what will determine the effectiveness of this framework.
- The interviews conducted and synthesized in this Policy Brief highlight common needs that stakeholders express towards this EU framework on resilience. They relate to enhancing coherence between sectors and countries, supporting action and peer learning, fostering cooperation around resilience—especially with regards to shared and transboundary risks—and ensuring interface with other policy areas to coordinate resilience strategies across sectors, while leaving room for flexibility and context-specificity in the way adaptation is planned across countries.
- These needs can be reconciled within an ambitious framework through three specific levers: (1) setting up common standards and definitions to foster a common understanding; (2) setting up EU-level resilience targets and guidelines as a starting point for nationally-determined specific targets; and (3) ensuring greater coherence of national plans.
