Understanding and avoiding maladaptation to climate change

Recent climate records, showing unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather events, underscore the urgent need for rapid, systemic and comprehensive adaptation to address the escalating impacts of climate change on all natural and managed systems. However, while adaptation is essential, not fully informed measures can backfire, leading to severe unintended consequences or to short-term gains that are not sustainable. In this context, maladaptation refers to adaptation actions unintentionally leading to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions or air pollutants, socio-economic, biodiversity and environmental trade-offs, increased or transferred vulnerability and greater social inequity. Most of the adaptation plans and implemented actions are relatively recent, so even if the cases of maladaptation are increasingly documented, the evidence is still scarce and sparse, as the latest IPCC reports confirm. There is a need to learn from the increasing evidence of maladaptation across sectors and regions, both in Europe and globally, to prevent maladaptation in policy design and implementation (e.g. of the EU Adaptation Strategy). Actions should address all the following aspects: Advance the understanding and identification of drivers that lead to maladaptation for a wide range of systems, socio-economic and environmental conditions. The analysis should be comprehensive and consider an integrated and systemic approach (including insights from Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to maladaptation causes and drivers of very diverse nature, such as trade-offs and feedbacks with other priorities and sectors, poor decision making and implementation practices and the inherent uncertainty and other features of the adaptation process). The analysis should also integrate the perspectives of public and private stakeholders and end-users, apply intersectional approach and include data disaggregated by gender, where relevant and feasible. Map and analyse evidence to identify and validate effective adaptation practices that prevent maladaptation and help to identify maladaptive ones. Case studies should be used for this purpose, for monitoring and evaluation of the adaptation measures, policies, and actions at a local, regional, and national scale, and from regions and sectors with diverse characteristics and environmental conditions. Engagement of end-users is encouraged to ensure robust and realistic characterisation of maladaptation experiences. Among other sources, integrating evidence from and for the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change is encouraged. Evidence and insights gained should be systematized and incorporated into main EU repositories. Strengthen the methodological and analytical toolbox for complex climate risk and adaptation assessments to increase public understanding and policy awareness of maladaptation risks, and to advance both qualitative and quantitative understanding of the most important complex risk feedbacks, particularly when they may result in significant constraints on options for climate action. Study and propose corrective responses for the identified maladaptation cases and provide systematised prevention guidelines and best practice examples to avoid maladaptive outcomes. Coordination and collaboration with most relevant on-going projects from Mission Adaptation, Cluster 5 Destination 1 “Climate Science and Responses" and from relevant Destinations from other Clusters is encouraged, especially for evidence retrieval, national scale assessment and methodological consistency. Specific resources should be devoted to this purpose and project scientific boards should cross-fertilised. Actions’ results should also contribute to future European Climate Risk Assessments.