Today the national day of tools for adaptation to climate change was held within the LIFE SHARA project. The conference was framed within the specific objective of the project to strengthen the capacities of the AdapteCCa platform to strengthen its role in the governance of adaptation to climate change in Spain.

Today the national day of tools for adaptation to climate change was held within the LIFE SHARA project. The conference was framed within the specific objective of the project to strengthen the capacities of the AdapteCCa platform to strengthen its role in the governance of adaptation to climate change in Spain.

The aim of the session, held online, was to raise awareness of the importance and relevance of adaptation to climate change and to present a set of practical resources to analyse the potential impacts derived from this phenomenon and define measures aimed at avoiding or reducing them. The session, aimed at managers of the regional and local public administration, technicians and researchers, representatives of NGOs and professional organizations, has also served as a training exercise for the proper use of the resources shown.

Elena Pita, director of the Biodiversity Foundation, and Valvanera Ulargui, director general of the Spanish Office for Climate Change, opened the conference.

Elena Pita stressed that “climate change is a driver of biodiversity loss, as shown by numerous studies, it decreases water availability and causes an increase in temperatures, among other consequences, and these effects have socio-economic repercussions”. In the opinion of the director of the Biodiversity Foundation, “nature is a provider of solutions to the challenge of climate change, such as the absorption of CO2“. Along these lines, he commented that the Biodiversity Foundation is working on renaturation and resilience in cities, “a field in which nature-based solutions are key. In urban contexts, the heat island effect can be reduced by applying these solutions.”

Regarding the value of the LIFE SHARA project, he emphasised that “the project has created interesting meeting places for dialogue. In addition, cooperation with Portugal has been fundamental in LIFE SHARA”, he concluded.

For her part, the director of the Spanish Office for Climate Change stressed that “adaptation to climate change is a shared challenge, a challenge from which we have learned a lot, but in which it is necessary to apply more resilient policies”. Ulargui insisted on the importance of holding this conference, “in which we will share the general analysis and how useful the LIFE SHARA project has been to generate knowledge about climate change. This seminar lands practical and useful tools”.

“We are at an important moment, with the new National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change. We come from a first Plan in which we have collected experiences and we have seen that what we need is a further step, and hence the new Plan, which places special emphasis on economic and social aspects and public adaptation policies”, he explained. For Ulargui, mitigation and adaptation should be a guide for all adaptation policies. “There has to be a policy of synergistic adaptation and mitigation, then. And the profitability of these policies must be integrated: every euro invested in adaptation will avoid future costs in actions”.

The conference offered an overview of the phenomenon of climate change, adaptation to it and the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC), in addition to presenting the AdapteCCa Platform, the Platform on Adaptation to Climate Change in Spain, and, in more detail, its viewer of climate change scenarios.

LIFE-SHARA “Awareness and knowledge for adaptation to climate change” is a project of the Ministry for Ecological Transition, through the Biodiversity Foundation, the Spanish Office for Climate Change, the Autonomous Agency for National Parks, the State Meteorological Agency, and of which the Portuguese Environment Agency is also a member.