The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is the centrepiece of a wider EU’s plan to recover from the economic and social damages due to Covid-19 pandemic crisis. In the framework of RRF, Member States (MS) submitted National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRP), outlining the reforms and investments they will implement by end-2026, with clear milestones and targets, including for the Green Transition category, featuring as of March 2023 an overall 6% of RRF funds allocated to ‘climate change adaptation’.
The core aim of this Regilience report is twofold: i) analyse if and how the NRRP developed by European MS include key measures dedicated to climate adaptation, in alignment with their existing National Adaptation Strategies and National Adaptation Plans (NAS/NAP); and ii) evaluate whether national NRRP sufficiently allocate investments to climate adaptation to match their NAS/NAP. These aims are further detailed in the methodology section, alongside the definition of sufficient investments, utilised for the analysis within the scope of this report. The comparative analysis included the review of 158 policy documents. The preliminary conclusions from the above were additionally corroborated during validation calls with regional experts from 4 countries and 5 regions. In doing so, regional promising practices are presented.
Overall, the findings seem to imply that: i) there is a lack of policy consistency when budgeting for/prioritising adaptation actions in NRRF, which in several cases are not aligned with the priorities and actions drafted in their pre-existing NAS/NAP documents. These results can vary, since some countries that do not seem to allocate funds to adaptation measures may be doing so under their national mitigation packages, embedding synergies between adaptation and mitigation in their measures; and ii) the information drafted in NAS/NAP in relation to each country’s climate hazards would urgently need to be updated to better reflect most recent hazards, risks and losses. This would provide a better alignment with the present-day, concrete high vulnerability in extreme climate events.
