Guiding Regional Climate Adaptation in Coastal Areas

Global climate change will have significant impacts on natural systems and human societies throughout the world. Therefore, climate adaptation strategies need to be developed at multiple scales. The Interreg IVB project “Climate Proof Areas” (CPA) has focused on climate adaptation at a regional scale in twelve pilot areas across four North Sea countries. It showed that the regional scale provides challenging opportunities of cross-sectoral climate adaptation. This paper gives an overview of experiences from the CPA pilot studies and embeds these in a generic approach for regional climate adaptation. Attention is paid to typical issues of coastal regions: water management, coastal protection, freshwater supply, land use, and spatial planning. Based on typical challenges of climate adaptation such as low sense of urgency, high degree of uncertainty regarding future development, and decision-making on a long term, a number of illustrative components are discussed which can contribute to the guidance of regional climate adaptation. These components cover different themes including communication issues, physical solutions, knowledge, and process-oriented approaches and result in a so-called adaptation toolkit. Finally we draw conclusions and derive recommendations about how certain approaches and policies at different levels can contribute to successful regional climate adaptation in coastal areas.