Shaping Europe’s Climate Future: Takeaways from the Fourth EU Mission Forum

The Fourth Forum of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change was held in Wrocław, Poland, gathering over 450 participants on-site and online. This annual event constitutes a key governance component of the Mission, bringing together national, regional, and local authorities, European institutions, Charter Signatories, and Friends of the Mission to reflect on progress, address challenges, and shape the future of climate adaptation efforts.

This year’s Forum, developed under the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, highlights concrete adaptation actions and experiences of Mission participants at regional and local levels. These were showcased not only during the Forum’s panel discussions and keynote speeches, but also during the pre-forum workshop, held the day before the main event. The pre-workshop featured a collaborative exercise in which participants co-created a newspaper from the year 2030, envisioning successful climate adaptation grounded in their local and regional challenges and enabled by supportive policies, funding access, citizen engagement, and science-based solutions. The imagined headlines reflected a shared ambition for resilient, inclusive, and climate-proof European communities.

Key learnings from the Forum included:

• It is time to speed up adaptation efforts. The urgency of the climate crisis demands quicker implementation of adaptation measures at all levels.
• There is strong ambition at regional and local levels to make resilience a reality, reflecting the urgent need to prepare for and strengthen responses to a changing environment.
• Private investment plays a key role. However, for such investment to materialise, proposals must offer a degree of certainty and guarantees that reduce risk.
• EU funding mechanisms should be more directly accessible to all governance levels. Funds should not be filtered exclusively through national or higher-level structures but made available based on actual local and regional needs. A more direct, needs-based distribution approach can accelerate targeted action and reduce disparities across territories.

As part of MIP4Adapt—the Mission’s operational platform—FEDARENE helped facilitate the Forum and reaffirmed its support for collective climate resilience. In line with this role, and as a key REGILIENCE partner, FEDARENE presented the new Quick Guide on Natural Hazards—developed with sister projects ARSINOE, IMPETUS, TransformAr, and Pathways2Resilience—during the Forum’s poster exhibition. These guides are tools for local and regional authorities to prepare for different natural hazards such as floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and storms.

FEDARENE’s participation in the Mission Forum reflects its commitment to advancing integrated and locally driven climate resilience. As outlined in its position paper, FEDARENE stresses that effective adaptation must be both urgent and inclusive—built on collaboration across sectors and governance levels. It recognises that building climate-resilient societies requires strong local and regional action, and highlights the importance of key facilitators such as energy and climate agencies in engaging communities, supporting local projects, scaling up initiatives, and identifying and replicating successful approaches from regions across Europe.