Quality of climate adaptation in national level or local level climate adaptation, measuring an adaptation gap

Recent research has shown that, in European cities, the quality of adaptation planning has improved over the last approximately 15 years; however, the focus on justice and vulnerability in climate adaptation planning has decreased. With that, European cities face an increasing adaptation gap, despite planning for adaptation for decades and receiving both institutional and financial support. 

According to UNEP, an adaptation gap is “the difference between actually implemented adaptation and a societally set goal, determined largely by preferences related to tolerated climate change impacts and reflecting resource limitations and competing priorities”. Conceptualizing and operationalizing this gap remains challenging, mainly because of difficulties in defining adaptation and measuring its baselines, progress and goals. Moreover, what is socially acceptable depends on the context and may change in response to socio-ecological, technological, and political conditions in the future. 

We have recently developed a methodology for "adaptation quality" that can be used to measure an adaptation gap at different scales, i.e. local and national levels. It is the goal of this MSc topic to adjust this adaptation quality index to other contexts, outside of Europe, to measure the quality and a potential adaptation gap, and to compute a digital tool to allow users/ stakeholders in the applied context to measure the quality and the gap themselves for other, e.g. cities, or nations in similar contexts or over time.