Guidelines for EU and Member State policy makers

This report outlines 21 policy-relevant recommendations – and supporting evidence – for policy-makers working at the EU, national and local levels to support adaptation decision-making. The recommendations are based on the combined findings of the BASE project and are differentiated between different policy levels, yet generic enough to be applied to different decision-making contexts. The lessons are based around the following 5 themes:

1. policy integration,
2. efficiency of policy,
3. knowledge use and learning,
4. stakeholder participation, and
5. the distribution of responsibility for adaptation.

An important overall empirical finding from BASE is that CCA planning is context-specific across countries, regions, local areas and sectors. Thus, the recommendations do not follow a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they provide more general suggestions to European decision-makers working at different governance levels on different policy issues, approaches, processes, institutional arrangements, policy instruments and decision support tools. The purpose is to support for more efficient and coherent adaptation decision-making across the policy cycle, and emergent synergies between bottom-up and top-down CCA policies and actions.

Fotolia © tashatuvango