The ‘Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change’ webinar took place online on Monday, 24th October 2022, 10:00-12:00 (Brussels time) and was attended by about 50 participants.
Chaired by Richard Smithers, Ricardo Energy & Environment, the webinar’s objective was to introduce the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change and to identify and foster synergies with the Green Deal Projects. In order to do so, the webinar addressed four sub-objectives:
- Provide an introduction to the Mission for climate adaptation (from an EC-policy level perspective);
- Explain how information flows from science to the Mission (show the links between science-policy-implementation and feedback loops);
- Illustrate through the GD Climate Adaptation projects, which are preparing the ground for the Mission, how H2020 projects are building a bridge between science and implementation on climate adaptation pathways and solutions through the pilots that can then serve as a reference for the Mission signatories;
- Provide the H2020 GD projects with useful information on how they can connect and interact with the Missions.
During the session, ‘H2020 Green Deal projects’ objectives and contributions to the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, Guido Schmidt, REGILIENCE technical coordinator, presented REGILIENCE and its sister projects ARSINOE, IMPETUS and TransformAr’ activities, among the climate adaptation projects.
The Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change is a fundamental element of the 2021 EU Climate Adaptation Strategy. It contributes to a European area of policymaking that has received less attention than climate change mitigation, but where the EU is prepared to take bold steps. The recently published report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Climate Change regarding Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability confirms the need to substantially accelerate our efforts to adapt to climate change.
The Mission deploys the new impact-oriented approach of European research and innovation policy in support of the European Green Deal’s objectives and will play an important role in promoting implementation of the 2021 EU Adaptation Strategy.
Investments from the EU and Member States in research and innovation for adaptation in past decades have already contributed to generating solutions. Once implemented at scale, they will contribute to increasing resilience to climate change. The H2020 Societal Challenge on climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials supported over 30 adaptation projects with more than 200 million EUR. Support was allocated through the H2020 Green Deal Call (for a total of 45 million EUR) to develop innovation packages and prioritize their application in regions with high vulnerability, limited adaptive capacity and/or high exposure to climate change impacts.
This resulted in four projects, which can be considered as the predecessors of the Mission. The four projects are REGILIENCE, ARSINOE, IMPETUS and TransformAr which are part of the Green Deal Project Support Office’s (GD-SO) Climate Change and Biodiversity Working Group.