Across Europe, the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, reinforcing the urgent need to strengthen resilience at all levels of society and across sectors. The European Commission has placed resilience at the centre of its policy agenda, notably through the forthcoming European Climate Resilience Framework, the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, and ongoing preparations for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). These developments underline both the political priority of resilience and the growing need to translate this concept into practical, actionable approaches on the ground.
Resilience remains a broad and often ambiguously defined concept, interpreted differently across sectors, levels of governance, and disciplines. For practitioners working on climate adaptation projects, this creates real challenges in understanding what resilience means in practice, how it can be implemented, and how it should guide project design, delivery, and evaluation. There is therefore a clear need to create space for structured dialogue that bridges policy and practice, helping to unpack and better define resilience in a way that is both meaningful and operational.
This Community of Interest session aims to respond to that need by bringing together those working in climate adaptation to exchange perspectives, experiences, and insights. The session will focus on the guiding question of “what is resilience?” in the context of climate adaptation, while linking the discussion to ongoing and emerging EU policy developments in the area. The session will also explore how resilience is being framed within the upcoming European Climate Resilience Framework, how it connects to the objectives of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, and how it may influence priorities under the next MFF.
The discussion will take a broad view of climate resilience, recognising that it includes several interconnected aspects. It will look at areas such as social resilience, focusing on how communities can better prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate impacts, as well as the importance of inclusion, fairness, and stakeholder engagement. It will also explore infrastructure and systems resilience, including how to make key services and assets more climate-proof, the role of nature-based solutions, and how different sectors—such as energy, water, and transport—are interconnected and depend on one another.