STAR2CS

With climate change, flooding will likely become more frequent and severe with damages in Europe reaching €23.5bn by 2050. Given floods are already costly to 2 Seas area, there is clear need to take proactive action to reduce the impacts of future flooding on our ecosystems, communities and economies. Member States have developed national adaptation strategies identifying such action. However, local authorities and regional agencies tasked with implement them are finding it challenging to deliver tangible adaptation measures. This difficulty is driven by a systemic failure to engage local stakeholders responsible for planning and decision making with adaptation due to several barriers including lack of: understanding of long-term costs/benefits, relevant tools and capabilities to support decision making and funding for perceived ‘future’ investments. Thus, there is little appetite or ability to deliver local adaptation, creating an ‘implementation gap’ between strategy and real change.

STAR2Cs will overcome the ‘implementation gap’ currently faced in delivering local action to build adaptation capacity by establishing an innovative transferable solution that:

identifies financial/social/technical/ecosystem-based mechanisms to deliver cost-effective adaptation

builds stakeholder knowledge/ability to participate in ‘future-proofed’ decision making

demonstrates success and cost-savings of integrated and incremental actions to implement adaptation for wider roll-out

As a result, implementation of adaption measures will be stimulated across the 2 Seas, leading to a 15% reduction in future costs from flooding evidenced by:

30% increase in local actions from 4 national adaptation strategies that are costed, timed and integrated into delivery

mechanisms

1000 stakeholders co-creating ‘future-proofed’ actions

15% increase in delivery of local adaptation measures

24 organisations reducing the impacts of floods by adopting the STAR2Cs solution in decision-making