Cities are at the forefront of climate change: they produce over 70% of global emissions and are home to more than half of humanity. Yet, a recent Nature Climate Change brief found that 70% of climate adaptation plans within European cities are inconsistent with local risks. This shows flagrant adaptation gaps: adaptation efforts don’t meet needs.
This is a familiar story by now, and another survey of “urban resilience pathways” or an inventory of flood defenses, green roofs, and cooling centers to understand how cities can adapt won’t be necessary. The challenge here is why, after so much awareness and planning, most cities are still so vulnerable to climate change. There is no lack of ambition or awareness, and the problem appears to stem more from a systemic issue: institutional adaptation is currently too slow compared to the pace at which cities are exposed to climate risks.
Why is Europe facing inconsistencies in climate change adaptation? There are three interconnected reasons: temporal, spatial, and governmental, as suggested in a chapter on cities and infrastructure in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th assessment report and the European Environment Agency’s report on urban adaptation. IPCC is the UN’s scientific group in charge of providing policy makers with scientific assessments on climate change, its reports assess the available information on climate change.
Temporal: A fundamental gap between politically influenced urban planning and decade long climate trends
The first and perhaps most fundamental issue is temporal. Climate risks stretch out over decades, but urban planning and political mandates operate on four- or five-year election cycles. Infrastructure budgets and adaptation plans are therefore often designed for short-term deliverables and political wins rather than long-term resilience. This leaves them exposed to political switches, reprioritization, or evolving agendas.
The issue is clear — political agendas cannot wait while climate change demands a paradox of both urgency and long-term planning. As a result, city officials tend to prioritize projects that are visible rather than durable, for example, a cooling corridor or a seawall ribbon-cutting is politically attractive. However, investments in institutional learning or maintenance that prepare cities for long-term adaptation needs may receive less attention.
Spatial: Climate impacts don’t stop at jurisdictional borders, but policies and actions often do
Secondly, there is a spatial mismatch. Climate hazards do not respect administrative boundaries and operate on broader geographical scales, yet most adaptation plans stop at municipal boundaries. Flood basins, heat islands, and droughts extend across metropolitan regions that require coordination among multiple jurisdictions. However, municipal governments still plan as if they are isolated actors. This leads to fragmented adaptation: for instance, one suburb invests in stormwater retention basins while their neighboring county builds impermeable parking lots that will ultimately offset those efforts.
A clear example comes from research on the city of Thessaloniki in Greece, the city’s peri-urban area faces increasing flood and heat risks, but spatial-planning responsibilities are divided among multiple authorities with limited coordination. Land-use plans focus on economic development and zoning rather than integrated risk reduction, and climate adaptation is only weakly embedded in regulatory frameworks. The result is a patchwork of policies that address parts of the problem while leaving the broader urban basin exposed.
Governmental: Constraints lead to institutional inertia
Finally, a governance problem underlies both the temporal and spatial gaps. Adaptation remains trapped in bureaucratic silos: housing departments design density targets, transport agencies expand road networks, and environmental offices plant trees, often without coordination. As the IPCC notes, these sectoral logics and fragmentations reduce the capacity to deliver adaptation and as a result, one policy may undermine another. Institutional inertia compounds the issue: updating zoning codes or building standards can take years, while the pace of climatic change accelerates and compounds annually.
Cities are dynamic and evolving entities that are shaped by demographic shifts, technological change, and continuous reinvention. And yet, urban adaptation responses are too often reactive, linear, and static. To close the adaptation gap, urban institutions need to evolve as cities themselves do, through feedback, learning, and iteration. Reports emphasize the importance of adaptive governance where policies are updated as new data and risks emerge. So how can this be achieved? Two principles stand out: cross-sectoral and adaptive planning.
Cross-sectoral and adaptive planning for climate-resilient cities
Cross-sectoral planning involves aligning traditionally separate departments (e.g., housing, transport, water management and health) into a shared adaptation agenda, thereby avoiding contradictory or redundant measures due to isolated actions. Studies of European cities show that when mitigation and adaptation are treated as separate policy streams, it often leads to inefficiency and missed opportunities for synergy.
More than just a policy failure, the adaptation gap is a systems failure. There is a visible lag between how fast cities can learn and how fast the climate is changing. Bridging that gap requires institutions that evolve at the same rhythm as the urban systems they govern. While the cities with the thickest plans or tallest seawalls may withstand evolving climate risks for some time, the true resilient cities are those that treat adaptation as a process of continual learning as dynamic, responsive, and creative as the challenges they face.
Adaptive planning, meanwhile, focuses on institutional learning; it is a governance structure that can evolve as risks, technologies, and knowledge change. Research reflecting on COP15 in Copenhagen and how to comprehend climate change in urban areas describes adaptive urban governance as a process of experimentation, feedback, and adjustment, where planning becomes a continuous learning cycle rather than a one-off intervention. The Climate Change Adaptation Strategy created by Rotterdam, Netherlands provides one of the clearest examples of this dual approach and embeds water management, spatial planning, and economic development within a single framework coordinated across government, private, and civil-society actors. Researchers have described Rotterdam as building “transformative climate governance capacities,” where policies and networks adapt as environmental and social conditions evolve, also demonstrating the adaptive approach the city has taken. Copenhagen’s Climate Adaptation Plan follows a similar cross-sectoral model, linking stormwater infrastructure, green corridors, and urban design to achieve both flood resilience and public-space improvement. Together, these examples illustrate that closing the adaptation gap requires institutions as dynamic and interlinked as the urban systems they govern.
Reader Question:
Do you think urban governance can learn as quickly as the climate changes? If so, how?