8. The future of adaptation in the Nordic region

The Nordic countries are at an important point in their adaptation journey, in which they have generated significant insight into climate change risks and the need for adaptation. As indicated in the previous chapter, much has already been done to enhance the adaptive capacity of the Nordic countries, and many challenges have been identified. As the countries progress further, more challenges and possibilities are likely to emerge.

To support this work, the final chapter of this report looks ahead at the potential that exists for adaptation across the Nordic countries to not only reduce risks and vulnerabilities but to support a sustainable and thriving Nordic region and beyond.

We have identified the overarching vision of more transformational adaptation as a frame for the potentials for adaptation in the Nordic region. The notion of more transformational adaptation is drawn from the increased recognition of the need to take an integrative approach to climate change, i.e., see it in connection with other societal challenges and priorities (O’Brien et al., 2022), and the framings within agenda setting documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) and the EU (European Commission, 2019). Transformational adaptation is defined by the IPCC (2018, p. 542) as “adaptation that changes the fundamental attributes of a socio-ecological system in anticipation of climate change and its impacts”. We perceive of transformational adaptation as an emergent goal that will likely rise on the Nordic adaptation agenda in the years to come.

To inform what more transformational adaptation might involve, we look to the aspirations of the 2021 EU adaptation strategy (European Commission, 2021). We take this strategy as our starting point due to the general lack of indicators for adaptation in the Nordic countries and the strategy’s ability to work as a common framework across the countries through its status as an authoritative document, presenting a blueprint for successful adaptation aimed at “forging a climate-resilient union” (Ibid, p. 3). We draw out four goals from the strategy that we believe can be fruitful for estimating the potential for further enhancing adaptation in the Nordic countries:

Below we describe the framing and the four goals in turn, before suggesting how the Nordic countries might align their adaptation efforts with the goals.

Within the academic literature, both adaptation and transformation are highly theorized fields, with transformative or transformational adaptation as a cross-cutting theme. Noting the nuances and debates within these fields, for the purpose of this report, we understand transformative adaptation to reflect a particular mindset that approaches adaptation as going beyond avoiding harm and taking advantage of benefits from a changing climate (Aall et al., 2015b). Instead, transformational adaptation uses adaptation as a mechanism for mobilizing societal resources for the enhancement of equitable, just and sustainable societies (Heikkinen et al., 2019; Pelling et al., 2015). Thus, rather than focusing only on the process and depth of change, transformational adaptation also aspires to a particular quality of change, guided by values of equity, justice and compassion for humans and nature (Aall et al., 2023; O’Brien et al., 2023).

It is challenging to work deliberately with transformational change, and research has found that most adaptation efforts that are framed as transformative, seldom are (Salomaa and Juhola, 2020). Thus, care is needed in identifying the linkages between adaptation and transformative change. According to the IPCC definition, more transformational adaptation should include describing and subsequently addressing the root causes of climate risks and vulnerabilities within strategies and plans. According to a growing consensus within the academic community, transformational adaptation should also include society-wide introspection on the values, visions and worldviews that can inform pathways for sustainable and equitable societies, as well as the development of strategies that connect long-term visioning with short- and medium-term actions and measures (e.g., Eriksen et al., 2015; O’Brien, 2012).

As with sustainability, the nature of more transformational adaptation in the Nordic countries will depend on the societal systems and structures already in place, and the people who inhabit them. Yet, the four goals from the EU strategy can act as helpful indicators for working towards more transformational adaptation (see Table 8.1 below).

In all Nordic countries, adaptation is framed as a response to climate change to avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities that result from a changing climate. Yet climate change science suggests that transformation is becoming inevitable: transformation will be either by design or by disaster. This points to the need for reframing adaptation as transformation. All Nordic countries have agreed to follow up the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) through their own national action plans, which includes SDG 13 on urgent climate action and, more specifically, target 13.1: “Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries”. Reframing adaptation as transformative and sustainable adaptation can help to ensure that adaptation efforts align with and support equitable and just change within the Nordic countries and globally. This is not primarily a technical exercise of changing the language of strategies and plans. Rather, it requires a deep-rooted cognitive and cultural shift within the adaptation community and beyond, both nationally and locally. This shift includes aiming more at proactive than reactive measures and at addressing the drivers of vulnerability, including the ‘new’ transboundary climate risks. Such a shift will need to be supported in various ways, for instance through programmes and platforms that help identify the linkages between adaptation and sustainability and how to work in an integrative way within specific sectors and locations.

Adaptation as transformation also requires the alignment of adaptation with other societal goals. While the benefits of taking an integrative approach to adaptation are increasingly recognized, in all Nordic countries there is a lack of knowledge about how to do so. For example, there needs to be more clarity on how to align adaptation with climate change mitigation and the other SDGs in a way that creates synergies and avoids conflicts. The integration of adaptation within other societal goals requires cross-sectorial conversations and collaboration explicitly aimed at operationalizing integration and developing strategies for such work. It could involve the inclusion of “integration criteria” in reporting and funding applications, to enable integration to become the “new normal”. Such “box-ticking” must be backed up by institutional capacity building to ensure that authorities have the skills and resources necessary within their sector.

Aligning adaptation with other societal goals invites a conversation about societal priorities. More transformational adaptation will likely involve critically questioning the current prioritization of economic growth as the overarching goal for societal development. It will be important for the Nordic countries to ensure that economic development does not undermine adaptative capacity, in the Nordic region and beyond, recognizing economic activity as interdependent with social and ecological wellbeing in a multi-generational perspective.

Closing the knowledge-action gap requires establishing mechanisms for systematic knowledge generation on climate change-related risks and vulnerabilities, including the socio-economic costs and benefits of action and inaction, and the inclusion of relevant user groups in co-production of knowledge. Such knowledge-generation should include both natural and social science questions and perspectives and take into consideration the growing recognition of transboundary climate risks as well as the insight that climate risks rarely occur alone. The latter point being captured in the term multi-hazards and illustrated through how the unprovoked war by Russia in Ukraine and the corona pandemic interact with various forms of climate risk.

Mechanisms for systematic knowledge-generation should be coupled with the development of appropriate indicators for measuring risks, vulnerabilities, and adaptation efforts, as well as evaluating adaptation outcomes. This should include indicators and measures to account for compounding, cascading and transboundary risks, including that of assigning responsibilities among stakeholders and government levels for addressing these risks. Evaluation work must move beyond current indicators of describing climate hazards and immediate risks (e.g., flooding and avalanche risks). More emphasis should be placed on developing indicators or proxies for evaluating qualitative aspects of sustainability, such as wellbeing, empowerment, and dignity.

To enable all-of-government and cross-sector collaboration and planning, the silo-structure within Nordic societies must be broken down. Most notably, the separation between adaptation and mitigation present in all Nordic countries prevent the ability for actors and projects to draw benefit from the synergies that can be created between these fields. Breaking down silo-structures and thinking will require careful deliberation that takes into account differing institutional logics and cultures and is guided by an overarching goal of sustainable development. Breaking down silos means that institutional routines must be established that ensure that a specific coordination body must be assigned a political mandate that makes it possible to effectively check that the various sector bodies follow up on their responsibilities, and that measures can be taken to ensure that such responsibilities are followed up. Breaking down silos can also make room for more integrative approaches such as Nature-based Solutions (NbS), which are fronted as a type of adaptation measure that considers the interlinkages between climate change, biodiversity, and social justice. By prioritizing such approaches (through the explicit inclusion in strategies, funding for research and funding for implementation locally), the Nordic countries stand to not only avoid and address costly goal conflicts but also benefit from the synergies that can be created between such related fields. This requires, however, an explicit commitment to understanding the nuances of such approaches and to critically examine assumptions and “short cuts” for supposed “win-win-win” solutions.

Creating a holistic and integrated system for adaptation will require a clearly articulated adaptation policy cycle where knowledge generation, and monitoring, reporting and evaluation (MRE) procedures are situated in relation to one another and support the continuous development of adaptation work nationally and sub-nationally. Embedded in this task is the establishment of national indicator systems for climate change adaptation, going beyond existing indicators that describe how the climate itself is changing. Such a system must include indicators that describe the development of vulnerability, exposure, climate risk, and the implementation of measures for climate change adaptation as well as the impact of the measures. The system should also seek to describe the more demanding conditions that apply to the societal drivers that inhibit and promote effective climate adaptation.

The development of financial incentives needs to happen at various levels and take a variety of forms. Incentives must account for both the national and local level actors, especially those responsible for protecting, maintaining, and upgrading physical infrastructure. There is a clear need to increase the use of “positive” economic policy measures, such as financing, and the Nordic countries are applying these to some extent. However, there is an equally clear need to assess how and to what extent “negative” measures such as taxes and fees can be used for adaptation in the same way that such measures are used within the emissions part of climate policy. The same applies to developing and applying approximations of the cost-benefit method that can work within adaptation. For individuals, insurance schemes can be enhanced to incentivise proactive measures. The recently adopted law in Norway, which requires insurance companies to make publicly available data on payments for natural perils, can be a source of inspiration to develop a common Nordic model for natural perils insurance that better facilitates prevention against future natural perils caused by climate change. In addition, there is a need for innovative financial mechanisms that allow municipalities and private actors to capitalize on linkages between adaptation, biodiversity and the SDGs, e.g., through nature-based solutions. There is also a significant potential in co-funding mechanisms, like public-private partnerships, that can create incentives for private property owners to implement adaptations. 

Another important step to supporting adaptation in practice is the translation of climate change adaptation-related knowledge to local contexts. More specifically, there is a need for “scaling down” climate predictions, to translate this into climate risks by assessing expected climate changes and expected societal changes (‘climate vulnerabilities’), and to link information about this with information about options for climate change adaptation measures to fit local contexts, which in turn requires assigning more resources to local and country-level authorities for both planning and implementation. Knowledge translation could be done through expanding the role of existing knowledge-generating bodies and platforms to include a wider set of climate risks (not merely the local physical climate risks), and to bridge the gap between climate and other types of risk that can contribute to intensifying the negative effects of climate change and should therefore be seen in context.

To support global climate action, the national Nordic governments should give sufficient political mandate to the leading bodies (e.g., ministry, agency, inter-sectoral group), to ensure that they can put adaptation high on their national political agendas within all relevant sectors as well as to be a leader internationally. Increased political mandate can enable the Nordic countries to embrace their responsibility and be accountable to local-level actors involved in adaptation nationally as well as international actors. It can further enable public bodies to accept risk ownership and ensure that all risks are accounted for in both the planning and implementation of adaptation measures.  Finally, enhanced political mandate will increase the likelihood of developing cross-Nordic strategies and collaborations in areas such as transboundary climate risks.

For the Nordic region to continue to be a trustworthy and visionary leader for social justice and equality, governments must strengthen international commitments for adaptation in an international context, which includes speaking up on behalf of nations and groups with less political and economic power, and follow up with courageous action, including but not limited to the commitments from UNFCCC COP27 on loss and damage. No country in the world is safe from climate change impacts until all countries are safe from climate change impacts. Therefore, Nordic governments and the Nordic region most take responsibility for climate change risks and impacts manifesting in other countries (many of which are in the Global South) that both directly and indirectly result from Nordic economic patterns of production and consumption.

Figure 8.1. Visual summary of policy recommendations