This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website
Climate change, a significant variation of average weather conditions over decades, represents a major human and global challenge. While certain actions can be taken to mitigate climate change (to avoid and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, which leads to global warming), other actions need to be taken in order to adapt to climate change.
Adapting to climate change involves changing our behaviour and ways of doing things to prepare for the unavoidable, so as to be able to protect ourselves, the environment and the economy from the impacts of climate change.
In February 2021, the European Commission published an EU climate adaptation strategy. This aims to complement the various actions taken by the EU to mitigate climate change by defining a strategy to adapt to the effects of climate change. It also seeks to help make the EU not only climate neutral (with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions) but also climate resilient by 2050.
The strategy has the following four main objectives.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change glossary from 2018 includes the following definitions.