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The Danube Region, home to 115 million inhabitants, is forecasted to be heavily exposed to climate change through rising temperatures, heatwaves, dry spells, storms, heavy rainfall, on local, regional, macroregional levels. Climate change impacts affecting the Danube Region go beyond individual state borders, and vary depending on biogeographical and hydrological characteristics, and on socio-economic and environmental factors. Some climate trends affect the entire Danube Region, yet certain risks pose greater challenges in specific - including cross-border - areas, due to their natural, social, or economic characteristics. Also, climate change impacts often affect the region’s countries simultaneously, posing similar challenges for policy makers, while different subregions may experience different impacts, depending on their geographical, economic, social characteristics. Given the shared challenges, ensuring effective adaptation responses in an environmentally, climatically, socially, economically interconnected Danube Region requires solutions that go beyond the national frameworks, but also offer optimal responses for each specific subregion.

The Danube-ADAPT project’s overall aim is to create harmonised data availability and knowledge in the Danube Region to support evidence-based climate adaptation policy making, and thus improve and balance the adaptive capacities of settlements, regions and countries across the Danube Region. To this end, a broad and balanced partnership was created with 23 organisations covering 10 DR countries, involving meteorological and hydrological, academic, policy-making and climate adaptation policy advisor organisations. Partners contribute a wealth of climate change and adaptation data, knowledge, as well as experience in adaptation responses, representing all governance levels.

Specific objectives of the project will be achieved through harmonising macro-regional data for climate change forecasting and vulnerability assessment, and developing territorially integrated, data-based policy support solutions tailored to the region to facilitate developing policy responses in a uniform manner, fostering transferability across the Danube Region. It will produce a Climatological Baseline Database of higher quality than the currently available international open-access ones, based on both observation data and future climate projections, serving as the basis for vulnerability assessments in the region. Furthermore, it will create data-led policy support solutions specifically for the Danube Region, based on jointly developed methodologies and regionally harmonized data. Spearheading these is the Vulnerability Assessment Framework, which – following the IPCC methodology - assesses vulnerability through harmonized climate and non-climate indicators, to be tested in pilots through sample vulnerability assessments and policy reviews. Consequently, results of vulnerability assessments will become comparable within the Danube Region, allowing for easier transfer and replication of adaptation responses. The project will also facilitate the policy integration of project outcomes and knowledge by setting up the Danube Region Adaptation Policy Support Platform (Danube-ADAPT Platform), helping policy makers to access and apply the data-based solutions in policy planning. Furthermore, it will raise awareness at various levels about data-driven policy making, offer e-learning material for capacity building and provide national roadmaps on climate adaptation policy enhancement. The expected impact of the project is to balance the disparities in climate adaptation knowledge, adaptive capacity and data availability in the Danube Region, and to foster international and cross-sectoral collaboration on climate change, facilitating evidence-based policy-making.