Metrics for climate change vulnerability, resilience and adaptation

“Climate change urges strategic decision-makers across sectors and geographies to both mitigate and adapt, while weighing different interests and dealing with uncertainties and unknowns. To support local stakeholders with such complex strategic and transdisciplinary decision-making, the aim of this deliverable has been to develop a flexible framework of indicators to undertake resilience assessments and evaluate climate vulnerability and climate adaptation measures and pathways. The proposed IMPETUS indicator framework consists of two complementary core frameworks related to climate vulnerability and climate adaptation. The core frameworks are considered most essential with respect to the demonstration sites and therefore account for Europe’s diversity in bio-geographical regions that range from continental, coastal, Mediterranean, Atlantic, arctic, boreal and mountains. Both core frameworks have been complemented with a list of additional indicators that apply to a more limited number of demonstration sites or bio-geographical regions. Next, a resilience handbook has been provided that enables the use of the core indicators and additional indicators to support more in-depth resilience assessments in task 3.4 of the IMPETUS project. The extensive literature inventory and the review of existing frameworks of indicators that are being applied at different spatial scales has ensured that the resulting set of indicators have been well embedded in leading academic debates and policy approaches. To ensure that indicators can be used by practitioners – being within the IMPETUS demonstration sites and beyond – they are designed to be easy to understand, timely and relevant, and with the end-users in mind. In this regards, stakeholders’ feedback has proved to be crucial in setting the IMPETUS indicator framework, allowing to incorporate experience from practitioners working at the local, regional and national scale.”

(Citation: Koop, S.H.A., Barendse, K., Castellani, C., et.al. – Metrics for climate change vulnerability, resilience and adaptation – IMPETUS – D3.1 (2022))