GD-SO webinar: Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change

The Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change is a concrete element of the 2021 EU Climate Adaptation Strategy. It contributes to an area of policymaking that has received less attention than climate change mitigation in Europe, but where the EU is prepared to take bold steps. The recently published report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 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 the 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 prioritise 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 the Mission's predecessors. The four projects are REGILIENCE, ARSINOE, TransformAR AND IMPETUS, which are part of the Green Deal Project Support Office’s (GD-SO) Climate Change and Biodiversity Working Group.

Objectives

The objective of the webinar will be 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 will address four sub-objectives:

1. Provide an introduction to the Mission for Climate Adaptation (from an EC-policy level perspective)
2. Explain how information flows from science to the Mission (show the links between science-policy-implementation and feedback loops).
3. 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.
4. Providing the H2020 GD projects with useful information on how they can connect and interact with the Missions.

Audience

The webinar will bring together Green Deal Projects working on topics where adaptation to climate change is relevant, representatives of the EC leading on the Mission for climate adaptation, experts and academics in the field, interested Member State representatives, national contact points that are part of the Mission Assemblies, representatives of regions and cities participating to the Mission and signatories of the Charter, and members of the network of multipliers set up in the context of the GD-SO. 

Speakers:

• DG Reseach and Innovation representative of the Climate Mission (Sophie Berger)
• Cheney Research Fellow at Leeds University and Director of I-CATALIST - Elena Lopez Gunn 
• TRAnsnational Cooperation on the MIssions approach (TRAMI) – Michael Ploder (Joanneum) 
• REGILIENCE project coordinator – Guido Schmidt (Fresh Thoughts) 

Missed the event? Watch the recording to catch up here.