From Climate Risk to Policy Action: Decision-Oriented Approaches for Urban Adaptation, Regional Planning and Forest Strategies under EU Climate Frameworks

Understanding physical climate hazards, risks, and impacts should be integrated with socio-economic contexts and policy-governance frameworks to support effective climate resilience and decarbonisation pathways. Science-based decision-making across sectors and scales, combined with a participatory approach, is essential in the current European policy landscape.

This work synthesises and integrates research outcomes from three Horizon Europe projects: CARMINE, CROSSEU, and OPTFOR-EU. These initiatives show the way multifaceted risk-vulnerability-impact assessments and extensive stakeholder engagement can inform regional planning for enhanced resilience, nature-based climate adaptation, and decarbonisation pathways.

CARMINE focuses on local and regional adaptation planning, combining high-resolution climate projections with socio-economic vulnerability indicators, spatial planning data, and stakeholder knowledge. This integrated approach is designed to support cities and metropolitan regions in identifying locally specific risk profiles and prioritising adaptation measures for building climate resilience in various environmental and socio-economic contexts across Europe. CROSSEU addresses systemic and cross-sectoral dimensions of climate change impacts by analysing how climate risks cascade across socio-economic sectors (i.e., agriculture, transport, tourism, forestry, health, social justice), infrastructure, and land-use. The project explores how institutional fragmentation and policy misalignment can hinder coordinated adaptation actions, underlying the importance of cross-sectoral and multi-level governance. OPTFOR-EU translates vulnerability and risk insights into operational decision-support tools for decarbonization. Applying optimisation and robust decision-making approaches, the project explores adaptation and decarbonisation options, such as NBS, forest management strategies, and low-carbon development pathways, under deep climate and socio-economic uncertainty. Together, the three projects are implemented through a portfolio of case studies spanning multiple European climatic zones, socio-economic and governance contexts, and land-use systems, enabling comparative analysis and strengthening the robustness and transferability of the results.

Across the three projects, there are several shared methodological and practical advances: (i) the integration of quantitative vulnerability assessment and risk metrics with qualitative and participatory inputs for a context-based decision-making, (ii) insights of policies and governance capacity for effective adaptation and decarbonisation planning,  (iii) evaluation of social risks and equity between climate change impact and pressing need for action, and (iv) strong alignment between analytical science-based ouputs and EU climate ambitions and policy framework, including EU Adaptation Strategy, The European Green Deal, regional and urban planning strategies and risk management frameworks. 

All three initiatives provide perspectives on how research can better support actionable, equitable, and climate resilience strategies. Key lessons learned highlight the need to: move beyond sectoral-specific and hazard-oriented assessments toward more integrated, multi-level decision-oriented approaches that connect urban, regional, and forest systems; embed vulnerability analysis directly into policy and planning workflows; and design flexible, robust pathways that jointly address climate resilience and decarbonisation, urban adaptation and risk management objectives