The topic “Water and Adaptation to Climate Change from a natural and social science perspective in coastal Mediterranean areas” highlights the role and importance of water for human life, nature and the economy, and the societal challenges emerging from climate change to protect our water resources and ecosystem services. In the last decade, many assessments of the impacts of global and climate change in the coastal zones have been undertaken. However, such assessments have rarely been connected to decision making on adaption strategies, often because of the uncertainties associated to climate change impacts. However, generic methods to inform decision making (e.g. the robust decision making) exist, but they have rarely been set up at regional and local scale. In addition, adaptation being trans-sectorial, there is a need to better demonstrate how such measures can be taken within the existing regulation on development, risk prevention and land use planning. In this context, the ADAP-MED questions: Is current decision making “adapted to internalize adaptation” into policy making? 

To address this question, ADAPT-MED will first collect and build a knowledge database for a well-selected regional research sites, namely: The territory around the Ria de Aveiro coastal lagoon in Portugal, The region “Provences-Alpes-Côte d’Azur” in France and the Easter coast of Crete (Greece). All these coastal regions have been affected by increased urbanisation in the last century, and will be diversely affected by the adverse effects of climate change on water resources, aquatic ecosystems and urban infrastructure. We will investigate how adaptation is currently being practice in these regions and how this relates to other regulatory mechanisms on land use planning and risk prevention. We will examine what adaptation measures would be desirable and how they can be mainstreamed/integrated within current policy, decision making and regulatory mechanisms. Finally, we will examine how changes in understanding, perception and values can result in changes in climate change adaptation decisions. 

The ADAP-MED strives to contribute to the European and national efforts in favour to adaptation of coastal zones to the effects of climate and global change, by creating a breakthrough on adaptation decision making practices, in particular by better taking account of vulnerability assessments and their uncertainties.  Stakeholders will be associated to the project right at the beginning, taking advantage of the current responsibilities of the partners in providing them support for coastal management and risk prevention. They will be involved through national and regional workshops. Wider dissemination will be done through policy briefs, scientific publications and newsletters.  

The ADAPT-MED research will be implemented by a research consortium of 5 partners that combine excellent scientific in the technical and socio-economic dimensions of environmental policy in general and of climate change adaptation in particular. In full coherence with the aim of the CIRCLE-2 (MED) call that is to encourage scientific cooperation between social and natural scientists, partner organisations from France, Portugal and Greece specialised in the two broad field of natural and social sciences are combining their expertise, experiences and innovative ideas to carry out ADAPT-MED research. The following figure summarises the key areas of expertise of each partner, highlighting the dual natural and social science dimensions of the proposed consortium.  

The ADAPT-MED research project is expected to produce a breakthrough in the field of decision making related to sustainable development, risk prevention and adaptation to climate and global change. This will be obtained by: 

 Better linking vulnerability assessment with decision making, notably takiing advantage of approaches such as the robust decision making (Lempert and Schlessinger, 201017). Indeed, although this method is conceptually recognized as having great potential for long term environmental decision making, there is a lack of “real case” applications in the scientific litterature;

 Focusing on decision making, both in terms of formalised or informal processes and decision makers considered as individuals whose perceptions and values are expected to significantly incluence the way climate change adaptation is made operational and effectively put in (policy) practice;

In policy terms, and thanks to the true partnership established between researchers and policy makers in ADAPT-MED, it is expected that ADAPT-MED research will in the medium term contribute to:  

 The identification of (governance, institutional and decision making) constraints on the internalisation of adaptation in existing policies or on the development of specific adaptation strategies; along with 2) practical options for removing these constraints, including in terms of changing the understanding, perception and values of  decision and policy makers on climate change adaptation;

 Raise awareness on climate change adaptation in coastal areas among decision makers/policy makers in the three partner countries and in the Mediterranean Region/Europe in general, as key to the development and implementation of effective climate change adaptation strategies and actions.

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With the objective to increase the research activity directed towards the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the possibility of associating scientific projects with the Sustainable Development Goals is now available in Ciência_Iscte. These are the Sustainable Development Goals identified for this project. For more detailed information on the Sustainable Development Goals, click here.