European policy responses to climate change: progress on mainstreaming emissions reduction and adaptation
Climate policy ‘mainstreaming’, ‘proofing’ and ‘integration’ are concepts that frequently appear in a range of EU policy discussions, most importantly in EU energy and climate policy. They reflect the view that all EU policy sectors need to play a part in both reducing emissions and increasing resilience to unavoidable climate impacts. The EU-funded RESPONSES project analysed to what extent adaptation and mitigation have been mainstreamed in EU policies—focusing on policies related to flood and drought risk, biodiversity, regional policy, human health and electricity—and assessed the potential opportunities and limitations.
Overall, the project concluded that while the goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been deeply integrated into EU sectoral policies, adaptation to climate variability and change impacts is much less well embedded. This appears to be due to the much lower political salience of adaptation to climate change, framed as adjustments to existing policy instruments so as to satisfy current political objectives in specific domains. More results can be found in a special issue of the journal Regional Environmental Change, while the introductory paper to this special issue provides an overview of the main findings of the project and draws general policy conclusions.
Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- European policy responses to climate change: progress on mainstreaming emissions reduction and adaptation
- Publication date
- 5 May 2015
- Publication type
- Publication
- Magazine
- Regional Environmental Change
- Product number
- 1867
