Our study provides a spatial analysis of European local climate adaptation plans to uncover regional policy perspectives on local climate adaptation issues. Such approaches can effectively inform broader EU, national and regional strategies that aim to support local adaptation planning in a context of multi-level governance.
The main findings we find are:
1) Central and Eastern Europe and Irish cities showed significantly higher scores on our plan quality index;
2) Western European and Nordic cities tend to have lower scores and less structured plans;
3) We recommend analyzing practices from higher-performing Polish and Irish cities in more detail to identify those planning processes that make these strategies above average.