Better Climate Change Adaptation through Transformative Innovation - Enabling Conditions and Future Perspectives
Lessons from empirical studies in five European territories
There is a growing scientific consensus that Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) – the process of adjustment to climate-induced impacts, underway or expected - is not being implemented at the scale, depth and speed needed to avoid dangerous climate-related risks. Moreover, due to the complex impacts of climate change, their strong interrelatedness and profound societal implications, solutions adopted in the past to address them are unlikely to work well in the future. The thesis of an analysis on this subject undertaken for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), between December 2022 and April 2024, was that transformative - even radical - adaptation solutions are needed to avoid much worse climate-related damage and higher costs in the future. The key question was: ‘How to harness the potential of the emerging “Transformative Innovation” paradigm to bring about more effective CCA strategies and actions?’ A conceptual framework was developed, which postulates that eight key transformative innovation’ features can act as “enabling conditions” for the design and implementation of CCA strategies with the necessary high transformative ambition. This framework was then deployed at empirical studies engaging representatives from five European territories: the region of Gorenjska (Slovenia); Iceland; the Northern Netherlands; the City of Turku in Southwest Finland; and the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (France). The report compares the strengths and weaknesses of the five territories in progressing towards the eight transformative innovation dimensions, discusses the variations in CCA performance, and concludes that so far none of the territories was fully successful in harnessing transformative innovation for CCA. Practical ways forward are suggested for each dimension which may potentially be followed by any territory seeking to move decisively towards genuinely ‘Transformative CCA’.
HARDING Richard;
NAUWELAERS Claire;
GNAMUS Ales;
2026-03-11
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC145620
978-92-68-38134-2 (online),
OP KJ-01-26-118-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC145620,
10.2760/1692122 (online),
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