Legislating climate change adaptation: Exploring provisions in European national climate laws

As climate-related risks intensify, European countries are increasingly integrating climate change adaptation into national climate laws (NCLs), signaling a trend toward the juridification of adaptation governance. This marks a transition from non-binding, soft policies to formal legal frameworks. Yet, the comprehensiveness and specificities of these new mandates remain unassessed. This paper presents a comparative analysis of adaptation provisions in the NCLs of 19 European countries, using a six-element framework to assess the extent and nature of juridification. Our results reveal a procedure-substance paradox. NCLs successfully institutionalize the foundational architecture of adaptation by mandating climate risk assessments, formalizing planning processes, and establishing advisory bodies, thereby solving first-order governance problems like institutional discontinuity. However, they rarely codify enforceable duties to achieve measurable risk reduction or guarantee funding. We argue that this focus on procedure fundamentally fractures the adaptation policy cycle. While this design preserves administrative discretion, it creates a critical disconnect: the laws link evidence to planning, but fail to link monitoring to climate-risk reduction. Consequently, NCLs establish a duty to plan but stop short of a duty to protect, prioritizing procedural compliance over substantive resilience.