4. Glossary

Adaptation

Adaptation consists of actions responding to current and future climate change impacts and vulnerabilities (as well as to the climate variability that occurs in the absence of climate change) within the context of ongoing and expected societal change. It means not only protecting against negative impacts of climate change, but also building resilience and taking advantage of any benefits it may bring. Various types of adaptation can be distinguished, including anticipatory, autonomous and planned adaptation (EEA, 2013).

Adaptation is defined by the IPCC as the adjustment of natural or human systems to actual or expected climate change or its effects in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities (IPCC, 2007) and by UNDP as a process by which strategies to moderate, cope with and take advantage of the consequences of climatic events are enhanced, developed, and implemented (UNDP, 2005). The European Commission Adaptation White Paper (2009) states that adaptation aims at reducing the risk and damage from current and future harmful impacts cost-effectively or exploiting potential benefits.

In the IPCC 2014 report, adaptation is defined as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.

Adaptation actions/options

Adaptation actions/options are adaptation measures considered for implementation. Adaptation actions/options can be clustered in four main types (EEA, 2013):

• 'Grey' adaptation actions are used to reduce vulnerability to climate change and create resilience. Examples include dyke building and beach restoration to prevent coastal erosion.
• 'Green' adaptation actions make use of nature. Examples include introducing new crop and tree varieties, allowing room for rivers to naturally flood onto floodplains, and restoring wetlands.
• 'Soft' adaptation actions are managerial, legal and policy approaches that alter human behaviour and styles of governance. Examples include early warning systems or financial infrastructure that can insure against damage from natural disasters.
• Combined actions are making use of all of these three types. In fact, the best results are often achieved by combining actions. For example, flood risk in a particular area can be addressed by a combination of green and grey actions, or grey and soft actions.

Adaptation measures

Adaptation measures are implemented adaptation actions/options. They are technologies, processes, and activities directed at enhancing our capacity to adapt (building adaptive capacity) and at minimising, adjusting to and taking advantage of the consequences of climatic change (implementing adaptation).

Adaptation policy process

The adaptation policy process consists of the initiatives undertaken by government or administration at various levels of governance and during the different phases of the policy cycle with the aim to foster adaptation to climate change. The adaptation policy process will often led to developing adaptation strategies and action plans. In the context of this report the adaptation policy process comprises the following stages:

1. Adaptation process has not started
2. Agenda setting (i.e. adaptation is politically recognised as important)
3. Formulation (i.e. responsible actors respond by formulating adaptation policies)
4. Decision (i.e. policymakers have adopted an adaptation policy)
5. Implementation (i.e. measures foreseen in the policy are being implemented)
6. Monitoring and evaluation (i.e. review and updates of policy/actions)

Adaptive capacity

The IPCC 2007 defines 'adaptive capacity' as the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes) to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences.

Awareness of the need for adaptation as a response to climate change

Awareness of the need for adaptation has a public dimension and is reflected in awareness of the public at large, including within communities, business and organisations. It also has a political dimension that is reflected in adaptation reaching the national political agenda and in the willingness to take adaptation actions. In addition, awareness of the need for adaptation is also reflected in the provision of, and need (by public and policy) for, scientific evidence.

Capacity building

IPCC 2007 defines 'capacity building' as developing the technical skills and institutional capabilities in countries to enable their participation in all aspects of adaptation to, mitigation of, and research on climate change.

Climate adaptation policy

"[the] actions taken by governments including legislation, regulations and incentives to mandate or facilitate changes in socio-economic systems aimed at reducing vulnerability to climate change, including climate variability and extremes" (Burton et al., 2002).

Coordination

Horizontal coordination mechanisms refer to institutions and processes in place to support integration of adaptation into sector policies. It entails that actors responsible for different policy areas within an administrative level (e.g. national) exchange information and adjust their activities so as to ensure that adaptation efforts result in coherent action responding to the unavoidable impacts of and, where possible, benefitting from climate change.

Vertical coordination mechanisms refer to institutions and processes in place to support integration of adaptation through multiple administrative levels within a country (i.e. national, provincial, regional, local/city level). This entails that information on and approaches to adaptation are transferred and exchanged effectively within each policy area from the national to the sub-national levels and vice versa.

Disaster risk

The likelihood over a specified time period of severe alterations in the normal functioning of a community or society due to hazardous physical events  interacting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespread human, material, economic, or environmental effects that require immediate emergency response to satisfy critical human needs and that may require external support for recovery (IPCC SREX, 2012, pp.558).

Evaluation

A systematic and objective determination of the effectiveness of an adaptation intervention in the light of its objectives. It is also a judgement of the measures relevance, efficiency, equity and overall utility. There are many different types of evaluation. An ex-ante or mid-term evaluation focuses on ways of improving a project or programme while it is still happening. In contrast, an ex-post evaluation seeks to judge the overall effectiveness of an intervention, usually after a project or programme has been completed.

Financing instruments

• Project-based public support: Implementing adaptation is facilitated with the help of public funding on the basis of projects (e.g. research projects including test cases where implementation is carried out, financing adaptation measures to be implemented regionally/locally).
• Explicit budgetary allocations: A dedicated part of public finance is earmarked to finance adaptation implementation. This may lead to project-based adaptation, and hence in some cases may be overlapping with project-based public support.
• Insurance mechanisms: To equitably transfer the risk of a loss, insurances help to avoid or minimize human and economic losses following climate change related events.
• Public-private-partnerships (PPPs): A venture between a government service and the private sector which is funded and operated through a partnership. PPPs can be a useful tool to combine financial and knowledge resources from both the public and private sectors on specific projects in order to foster adaptation implementation.

Knowledge

In the context of this section, knowledge refers mainly to scientific and technical evidence that is relevant to risk, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change. Knowledge generation refers to the production of scientific-technical evidence relevant to climate change adaptation such as research programs and risk/ vulnerability assessments (based on Edelendos et al., 2011). Knowledge use refers to the application of scientific-technical evidence relevant to climate change adaptation in support of well-informed policy decision-making (based on Davies, 2004).

Implementation

Implementation in the context of the policy cycle framework is defined as ’to put a public policy into effect’. Once policy makers decide on, formulate and adopt a policy, then it is implemented, i.e. activities identified in the policy document are translated into concrete actions. Implementing adaptation is a dynamic iterative learning process, and monitoring and evaluation help to adjust policy responses and actions to accommodate, for examples, the availability of new information such as changes in climate and socioeconomic conditions (IPCC, 2014).  Adaptation action that is taken by independent of government policies are considered to be ’autonomous’ and not captured by the self-assessment survey.

Indicators

An indicator provides evidence that a certain condition exists or certain results have or have not been achieved and can be either quantitative or qualitative. Two distinct types of indicators can be used: a process-based approach seeks to define the key stages in a process that would lead to the best choice of end point (process indicators), without specifying that point at the outset and an outcome-based approach seeks to define an explicit outcome, or end point, of the adaptation action (outcome indicators).

Monitoring

To keep track of progress made in implementing an adaptation intervention by using systematic collection of data on specified indicators and reviewing the measure in relation to its objectives and inputs, including financial resources.

National adaptation interventions

National adaptation interventions include preparing a country for climate change, developing and implementing national strategies, action plans and specific policies.

National adaptation plan (NAP)

A national document that articulates the implementation of a country's climate change adaptation strategy. In most cases, the NAP presents adaptation measures and provides information for implementation (e.g. responsibilities, financial resources).

National adaptation strategy (NAS)

A national document that articulates a country's strategic vision with regard to climate change adaptation.

Planning adaptation

In context of this report, planning adaptation activities include the following tasks (based on EC, 2013):

1. identifying possible adaptation options: collecting and describing a wide spectrum of possible adaptation options, including soft, green, grey and combined measures
2. assessing adaptation options: appraising options regarding their effectiveness in addressing potential impacts from climate change, their implementation time frame, direct and indirect effects in environmental, social and economic terms as well as costs and benefits, and other criteria.
3. prioritising adaptation options: identifying and assessing adaptation options typically detect more adaptation options than can reasonably be implemented, especially in the short term and taking financial limitations into consideration. Thus, specific adaptation actions need to be prioritised.

Reporting

To provide information about what is happening in relation to adaptation. Reporting is mostly co-ordinated with either a monitoring or evaluation scheme and reported internally (within an organisation or country). Reporting can also be an external, explicit requirement related to international procedures, for example the National Communications of the UNFCCC or the revised Monitoring Mechanism Regulation (MMR) of the European Union.

Resilience

IPCC 2007 defines 'resilience' as the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.

In IPCC 2014, resilience is defined as capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation.

Risk

The word "risk" has two distinctive connotations: in popular usage the emphasis is usually placed on the concept of chance or possibility, such as in "the risk of an accident"; whereas in technical settings the emphasis is usually placed on the consequences, in terms of "potential losses" for some particular cause, place and period. It can be noted that people do not necessarily share the same perceptions of the significance and underlying causes of different risks.

IPCC 2014 provides a new definition on risk. It is defined as the potential for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is uncertain, recognizing the diversity of values. Risk is often represented as probability of occurrence of hazardous events or trends multiplied by the impacts if these events or trends occur. Risk results from the interaction of vulnerability, exposure, and hazard.

(Climate change) Risk assessment

In general, a climate change risk assessment is an overall process of climate change risk identification, analysis and evaluation of a particular system in order to ensure this system will be resilient to climate change. It includes: the use of climate scenarios to assess the projected climate change impacts to a system, the estimation of the probability of these impacts and then the final estimation of the climate risk to this system. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques can be used to describe and assess risks. Quantitative assessments assign a numerical value to the probability of an event occurring, while qualitative assessments use general description of the magnitude of potential consequences and the likelihood that they will occur.

(composite definition informed, amongst others, by IPCC AR4 WGII, 2007)

Sensitivity

Sensitivity is the degree to which a system is affected, either adversely or beneficially, by climate variability or change. The effect may be direct (e.g., a change in crop yield in response to a change in the mean, range or variability of temperature) or indirect (e.g., damages caused by an increase in the frequency of coastal flooding due to sea-level rise) (IPCC AR4 WGII, 2007).

Stakeholders

In the context of this report, stakeholders have been clustered into the following groups:

• Governmental officials from national level (e.g. policy makers, public administration, governmental agencies)
• Governmental officials from sub-national level (including provincial, regional and local level)
• Private sector
• Interest groups (e.g. farmers' associations, NGOs)
• Scientists/researchers
• General public

The scale used for the level of stakeholders involvement is as follows:

• Information given = information has been provided to stakeholders (e.g. web-sites, newsletter, reports, informative meetings)
• Information gathered = information has been collected from stakeholders (e.g. online-survey)
• Consultation = feedback on policy draft proposals has been obtained from stakeholders (e.g. written feedback on policy drafts)
• Active involvement = stakeholders have actively been involved in, and have had the possibility to shape decision-making in the adaptation policy (e.g. advisory committees)
• Partnerships = decision-making power is redistributed through negotiation between responsible authority and stakeholders
• Empowerment = final decision is in the hands of the stakeholders

Active involvement, partnerships and empowerment are considered ‘deeper’ forms of stakeholder involvement in the context of this report. Country responses brought up an additional form of involvement, co-creation, where multiple public and private sector stakeholders work together and share responsibility for developing knowledge, options and solutions. Elements of co-creation can be found in both partnerships and empowerment.

State of adaptation

In the context of this report the scoring of the state of adaptation has used the following scale:

0= adaptation is not relevant for my country

1= need for adaptation not recognised and no measures implemented yet

2= coordination activities for adaptation started

3= some adaptation measures identified for the sector but not yet implemented

4= portfolio of adaptation measures identified and implementation (of some) launched

5= portfolio of adaptation measures implemented

6= portfolio of adaptation measures in place and monitored/evaluated

Sub-national level

Sub-national in the context of this report includes provincial, regional and local administrative levels.

Transnational cooperation

Transnational cooperation covers both cross-border cooperation between (neighbouring) countries and transboundary cooperation among countries with shared transboundary resources (e.g. water, protected areas) or otherwise shared interests. In the context of this report transnational cooperation refers to cooperation within Europe and thus excludes international cooperation with developing countries. Transboundary cooperation between regions within a country is not considered here.

Uncertainty

An expression of the degree to which a value (e.g. the future state of the climate system) is unknown. Uncertainty can result from lack of information or from disagreement about what is known or even knowable. It may have many types of sources, from quantifiable errors in the data to ambiguously defined concepts or terminology, or uncertain projections of human behaviour. Uncertainty can therefore be represented by quantitative measures, for example, a range of values calculated by various models, or by qualitative statements, for example, reflecting the judgement of a team of experts.

Vulnerability

The IPCC provides various definitions for the term “vulnerability”:

Vulnerability is the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes. Vulnerability is a function of the character, magnitude, and rate of climate change and variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity (IPCC, 2007).

Vulnerability is the propensity or predisposition of a person or group to be adversely affected. (IPCC SREX, 2012).

Vulnerability is the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected. Vulnerability encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt (IPCC, 2014).

(Climate change) Vulnerability assessment

Generally, a climate change vulnerability assessment is aimed at informing the development of policies that reduce the risks associated with climate change. Climate change vulnerability assessments are conducted in a variety of contexts, and for a diverse group of stakeholders motivated by rather different concerns. Two generations of assessments of vulnerability to climate change can be distinguished:

• First generation vulnerability assessments, which are characterised primarily by the evaluation of climate impacts in terms of their relevance for society and by the consideration of potential adaptation.
• Second-generation vulnerability assessments, which assess the adaptive capacity of people, thus shifting the focus from potential to feasible adaptation.

At the present day an assessment of vulnerability to climate change include a sensitivity analysis for the system under study and an evaluation of the adaptive capacity of this system in order to determine how and where this system is vulnerable to climate change (IPCC AR4 WGII, 2007; Fussell and Klein, 2006).