Success factors and barriers for adaptation strategies

Even if the emission of greenhouse gases is reduced significantly over the coming years, it is essential to adapt to the already caused climate changes. Against this background, political processes were increasingly initiated at the international, European and national level. Thus, the topic “adapting to the impacts of climate change” has established itself as an independent policy field alongside the issue of climate protection. In Germany, this took place with the adoption of the German Adaptation Strategy (DAS) in 2008 at the latest.

In order to shape this relatively young policy field, a better understanding of how successful climate adaptation policy can be implemented is required. In the context of the project “Conditions for success and barriers to adaptation strategies”, adelphi is analysing which factors determine the success of international and national climate change adaptation policies.

In that regard, a focus of adelphi’s work was the analysis of the adaptation process at the different federal levels in Germany. For this purpose, adelphi carried out numerous interviews with experts responsible for selected adaptation strategies of federal, state and local authorities as well as stakeholders from economy, civil society and academia. In addition, the results of the project and the derived recommendations for the policy field adaptation were discussed in the context of several workshops with representatives from politics, administration, science and civil society.