Challenges to planning climate adaptation strategies in Europe

Climate change impacts may lead to serious ecological, economic and social impacts across Europe. Multi-scale and multi-sector approaches can help in identify appropriate adaptation that reduce climate change impacts and, in some cases, yield benefits and business opportunities. Decision makers at all levels in Europe, however, currently face a number of significant challenges when devising appropriate and sustainable adaptation strategies.
As an output of the EU FP7 project BASE, this policy brief summarizes the key challenges, the implications for adaptation strategies and measures and points to avenues of research that could facilitate enhanced adaptation decision making.
The main challenges are categorized as follow:

• Uncertainties and insufficient knowledge
• Need to improve assessments
• Need to improve mainstreaming of adaptation in policy

As addressing these challenges forms one of the main aims of the BASE project, the policy brief concludes with a larger view towards future research, including the role that BASE aims to play.