The Adaptation Support Tool – Getting started

The aim of the Adaptation Support Tool (AST) is to assist policy makers and coordinators on the national level in developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating climate change adaptation strategies and plans. The AST was developed as a practical guidance tool for national level actors for all steps needed to develop, implement, monitor and evaluate a national adaptation strategy. In addition, the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change focuses on supporting EU regions, cities and local authorities in their efforts to build resilience against the impacts of climate change. Under the EU Mission on Adaptation the Regional Adaptation Support Tool (RAST) has been developed to help local and regional authorities with climate change adaptation strategies and plans. The Urban Adaptation Support Tool complements this approach by guiding sub-national authorities, that is regions and local authorities in preparing, developing, implementing, and monitoring adaptation strategies.

In 2023 the European Commission issued the EU guidelines on developing adaptation strategies as a component of the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change with the aim to support EU Member States (MS) in the process of developing, implementing and reviewing their adaptation strategies. They provide a common understanding of key features relevant to adaptation policy processes, building on the experience available in the EU. The steps and recommendations of the Adaptation Support Tool are aligned with the contents of these guidelines and further improved based on the most recent information and knowledge available, including the experiences of EU Member States with adaptation policy making and insights provided by more recent EU research and innovation projects.

EU MS have progressed and the status quo of climate change adaptation (CCA) policy processes in countries has changed since the first publication of the AST. For example, since May 2020, all countries have a national adaptation strategy, and many have an adaptation action plan in place. Some countries have already traversed a complete adaptation policy cycle, including Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and revision(s) of national policies.

Also the purpose of the AST has changed over time, reflecting on the context, namely more guidance for advancing, improving and updating national adaptation strategies and policies; more focus on implementation and Monitoring & Evaluation. In the AST the cross-sector and multi-level governance issues as implementation progresses to more regional and local levels became more important.

The AST is based on the adaptation policy cycle, which is a valuable analytical framework, but in practice, steps may tend to overlap and intermit. Since climate change adaptation is not a strictly sequential, linear process and countries may be in very different stages of the process, the AST provides guidance as an iterative process that will help ensure decisions are based on up-to-date data, information and knowledge. An integral part of this iterative process is to monitor the implementation progress and effectiveness of measures, their evaluation and to revise policies.

Inspiring Climate-ADAPT use cases
Discover how the knowledge displayed in this page has inspired actors working at different levels of governance to develop tailor-made solutions in different policy and practice contexts.

• Turkiye: Using the Adaptation Support Tool as a comprehensive and systematic checklist for developing a project proposal to revise the National Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan of Turkiye
• Ireland: Using Climate-ADAPT Adaptation Support Tool to prepare the Local Authority Adaptation Wizard by Climate Ireland
• Local and regional authorities in Slovakia: Using Climate-ADAPT to develop a methodological guidance for local and regional authorities in Slovakia preparing adaptation action plans