In 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted, I remember celebrating because there was finally a global goal on adaptation –  “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change”. In the years that followed, however, mitigation continued to overshadow adaptation, largely due to the difficulty in establishing clear ways to measure it. Mitigation, by contrast could put numbers to emissions cuts, trajectories and carbon budgets.

Nevertheless, adaptation had found its way onto the same policy page as mitigation, and over the decade international negotiations added important elements: bringing more attention to loss and damage, recognizing the important role of local communities, and establishing global targets.  

And yet, in 2025, working on European subnational adaptation, I recognize many of the same problems we faced in 2015. This is not because nothing has happened.

Drivers of actions

In Europe, two strong drivers are pushing things forward. The first involves policy.  EU-level policy became much more explicit through an array of measures: the European Climate Law, the updated EU Strategy on Adaptation, elements of the European Green Deal, nature restoration regulations, and, especially, the sustainable finance agenda, with a classification system for sustainable activities and a corporate sustainability reporting directive. All of these policies and initiatives sent signals to different actors operating within the EU that climate risks have to be managed. At the same time, there has been real progress on justice and inclusion. Compared with 2015, EU policy and funding instruments are far more likely to name justice explicitly and to expect that vulnerable groups are considered.

The second driver is nature itself. Europe has been hit, year after year, by extreme and often record-breaking floods, fires and temperatures. That has made climate impacts more visible – and related political actions more justifiable.  

However, at the local level where adaptation takes place, the same bottlenecks of 2015 remain – even though more local authorities now have some kind of adaptation activity. Mainstreaming is tempered by a strong siloed approach to spatial planning, infrastructure, innovation or social policy. Progress is stalled by competing political priorities, public-sector budget cuts, limited capacities, the lack of needed data, and the absence of local quantitative targets related to adaptation.

Getting justice “onto the agenda” at municipal level still requires integration into everyday practices for participation, budgeting, and cross-departmental work. This involves building institutional and capacity – efforts that take time. Local municipalities, companies and residents still need national-level guidance and collaboration across borders at regional levels, to tackle shared risks, scale adaptation and devise more effective solutions.

Needed finance is often elusive. The business case for adaptation is harder to make, especially at smaller scales, and adaptation projects are more complex to package in a way to create a return on investment, especially in the short term. For example, a recent review of nature-based solutions aligned with disaster risk reduction found that of the projects where finance sources were known, only 3% were financed by private capital, and only 9% by blended public and private sources. Similarly, between 2014 and 2020, of the 16.4% of green bond deals that had adaptation and resilience-related uses of proceeds, 92% of those were issued by public actors, with financial and non-financial corporates accounting for only 7%.

Moreover, adaptation is still perceived as a public good, which makes it hard to shift costs and responsibilities across society, even though everyone benefits.

Future focus areas

So, what should be the focus of the next 10 years? Two aspects are crucial.

One is implementation. Moving forward requires implementing adaptation measures and, crucially, tracking impacts and progress. To do this means reaching a consensus about indicators that align with the procedure and outcome-oriented targets in the UEA Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which “positions climate adaptation … as a top priority for all nations”.

Another is adaptation finance. While the UN Climate Conference largely focuses funding discussions on financial assistance from higher-income to lower-income countries, adaptation actions in better-off countries also need to include the integration of adaptation and resilience funding into the various levels of domestic funding. Current reliance on project-based adaptation actions limits the continuity and breadth of adaptation activities. Investment into adaptation and resilience needs to be seen as an investment into maintaining prosperity and competitiveness, rather than competing with these goals. Active efforts should be made to encourage experimentation with different forms of financial instruments, such as public-private partnerships, green bonds, and procurement and insurance mechanisms.

The international and EU adaptation architecture has developed over the past decade. But international climate negotiations and decisions do not construct green roofs, redesign stormwater systems, or set up social protection for heatwaves. Those things will either happen in municipalities or only surface in aspirational language. If, by 2035, we want to say that the global goal on adaptation really translated into greater resilience in Europe, then we have to fix the enabling conditions for local actors today.