Cooperation is central to improve climate change adaptation across Europe
Europe’s border regions and shared maritime areas are facing increased negative impacts due to climate change, but countries and regions responsible for these areas are already taking action at transnational scale to adapt to these impacts according to a European Environment Agency (EEA) briefing published this week.
The vulnerability to climate change belongs to the most pressing environmental issues in central Europe. More frequent heavy rains cause environmental damages and floods, hotter summers and heat waves. They lead to increased water scarcity but also erosion of soils, loss and degradation of biodiversity and habitats.
Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE projects show a clear link to the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change and the Territorial Agenda of the European Union 2020. They aim at counterbalancing the negative impacts of climate change and prevention of environmental risks and want to make the EU more climate-resilient. Moreover, efforts to reduce disaster risks and adapt to a changing climate are not only an EU but also a global priority: They are among the main goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Contribution of our projects
Our projects tackle these climate-related aspects by focusing on the improvement of integrated environmental management capacities. They counteract the impacts of weather- and climate-related hazards on ecosystems and biodiversity, the economy and human health. The following four projects are directly addressing the relevant challenges linked to climate change risks and adaptation measures:
- RAINMAN focuses on integrated heavy rain risk management;
- FramWat strives to improve the water balance and nutrient mitigation through small water retention measures;
- PROLINE-CE improves the protection of drinking water resources against floods/droughts in an integrated land-use management approach;
- SUSTREE contributes to the conservation and sustainable use of forest tree diversity in response to climate change.
Promising outputs encompass among others the development of tools, action plan plans and strategies but also infrastructure measures at the territorial level (e.g. forecast and warning tools against heavy rains, selection of tree species less vulnerable to climate change effects or building small water retention measures for climate-proof water resources management). The most relevant outputs for exploitation are strategies for policy improvement, climate-change adaptation tools and results from the conducted pilot actions.
Learn more about our environment projects