Just Resilience for Europe: Towards measuring justice in climate change adaptation

The recently published Sixth Assessment Report is the first IPCC report to highlight justice as a core element of climate change  adaptation, alongside effectiveness and feasibility. Justice has emerged as a key concept on the back of much growing evidence regarding how the most vulnerable people and systems are disproportionally at risk from climate change.

This paper (ETC CA Report 1/23)  contributes to making just resilience operational by stocktaking and structuring the knowledge on just resilience in climate adaptation, with a specific focus on providing relevant information towards measuring progress on just resilience in the European context, including the identification of potential indicators.

Four questions have been identified as guiding this paper, centred around the collection and integration of knowledge in three core areas: policy priorities, scientific evidence, and existing indicator approaches and data.

To answer these questions, the paper follows the below focus and structure:

• to provide an introduction and description of core aspects of just resilience according to latest developments in the field, to support policy and practice as well as monitoring and indicator design (Chapter 2);
• to assess and analyse justice implications of climate change risk and impacts and adaptation interventions (policies and measures), including for current policy priorities for the EU and EEA Member Countries (Chapter 3) and in European policy sectors (Chapter 4); 
• to provide an overview of existing indicators, frameworks and methodological developments that can be used in measuring, monitoring and reporting progress towards just resilience (Chapter 5); 
• to cross-examine policy, evidence-base and available data and the potential to account for justice in each step of the adaptation planning cycle (Chapter 6), and to summarise the key gaps and opportunities towards operationalising just resilience for Europe and priorities for advancing the knowledge on how to measure justice in adaptation (Chapter 7)

The main target audiences of the scoping paper are: • Governmental decision-makers in Europe • EEA Experts  • Practitioners, working on adaptation at transnational, national and sub-national and local levels •  others working in the field of adaptation to climate change and just transition in general.