The session will present the methodological point of departure and identification of research gaps and needs of the EU FP7 project Bottom-up Climate Adaptation Strategies towards a Sustainable Europe (BASE). The session will, focus on the key problems of adaptation strategies. It will do this by examining simultaneously the general policy at the EU and national level and actual activities at local and regional levels and provide an outlook on the current status of adaptation in the EU. The session will also investigate baseline estimates of costs that can be avoided through adaptation, as well as analyses of no- or low-regrets costs for adaptation at sectorial, national, and EU level and investigate how to upscale from case studies to higher levels of organization. Replicable case studies are critically important to be able to generalize across sectors and countries, and to provide tailored data input to the economic models need to support policy making. The session will explore the case study design process adopted in BASE. Case studies will be clustered and made comparable across countries and in order to provide new empirical data that can be used and reanalysed in integrated assessment modelling. The aim is to test and analyse ways of bridging the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches in evaluating adaptation policies and measures. BASE will explore the nature of these processes in order to understand how awareness raising and transparency of governmental plans and actions (e.g. through participatory actions) can contribute to making climate change adaptation strategies truly adaptive to changing conditions at a bottom-up level – hence the session will present the consideration and experiences the BASE team has in relation to the on the ground challenges of case study implementation. The quantitative and qualitative output of the case studies and modeling will be modeled using various approaches, e.g. adaptation pathway development in support of adaptation policy making. These methods will be outlined and reviewed in session drawing lines back to the current status of the adaptation in the EU and thereby qualify future research needs to fulfill the adaptation needs and aims of the European Union.
Read more about the BASE project at: http://base-adaptation.eu/
