Horizon Europe DISTENDER: Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Climate Risks

Across the EU, the topics of climate adaptation and climate change mitigation are gaining increasing importance in regional and local policymaking. For this reason, it is of great importance to ensure that the two policy fields do not come into conflict, that synergies are exploited, and that the corresponding measures are politically legitimized.

The research project "DISTENDER", funded under the EU research programme "Horizon Europe", made an interdisciplinary contribution to the integrated consideration and alignment of adaptation and mitigation strategies. At its core were a participatory approach, stakeholder engagement, and co-creation: In five European core case studies as well as several follower cities, local challenges, strategies, and policies were jointly developed with actors from government, business, science, and civil society and fed into the modelling work.

Based on eleven European pilot studies, DISTENDER developed a methodological framework to assess interactions, synergies, and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation policy fields both qualitatively and quantitatively. Building on this foundation, integrated, cross-sectoral strategies were developed for areas including water, energy, agriculture, health, mobility, urban development, and biodiversity, and were analyzed with regard to effectiveness, robustness, feasibility, and cost-benefit ratio.

The central outcome of the project was a Decision Support System (DSS), which serves as a user-centred, transferable decision support tool for policy and administration. It integrates climate and socioeconomic scenarios, sectoral impact modelling, indicators, and multi-criteria assessment of adaptation and mitigation strategies. Decision-makers can thereby compare and prioritize strategies and apply them to different future scenarios as "stress tests" in order to identify robust, context-specific strategy portfolios.

adelphi was responsible for project monitoring and impact evaluation within the framework of DISTENDER. As lead of the work package on impact monitoring and impact assessment, adelphi jointly developed with partners a theoretical and methodological foundation for DISTENDER impact monitoring, including a theory of change, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs), and a multidimensional impact framework. On this basis, adelphi designed and implemented a formative monitoring approach that encompassed multiple survey rounds (online surveys, interviews, observations, workshops) throughout the project duration.

In doing so, adelphi captured and assessed both progress towards achieving project objectives and the short- and long-term impacts of the project, for example with regard to co-creation and stakeholder engagement, science-policy interaction, networking, awareness of climate risks, and the use and added value of the DSS. The results fed into ongoing project management, learning processes within the consortium, and the assessment of DISTENDER's overall societal, political, and economic impact.