Andrea Omizzolo (p), Philipp Corradini, Agnese Moroni

Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis

Thanks to the support of the Interreg Alpine Space ‘BeyondSnow’ project, in the last two years a group of ten mountain winter destinations at low-medium altitude, conjointly devised new sustainable development paths and transition processes to increase their socio-ecological climate resilience.
These are mainly small tourist destinations and communities, spatially distributed across six Alpine countries, differing in size, development level and criticalities, which are very dependent economically and socially on the presence of snow.
They opted for these adaptation path because, due to Climate Change (CC), it is very likely that snow cover in the Alps will continue to decrease in the future. In addition to the ecological impacts, they must therefore also consider the socio-economic consequences of decreasing snow cover. They need to maintain or increase their attractiveness for inhabitants and tourists.
Authors aim at presenting the summary of the ten strategies, one of the main outputs of the BeyondSnow project, including an overview of the CC adaptation measures developed in each of ten areas as well as a summary of the processes undertaken for their development.
Indeed, authors believe that what emerged may stimulate further research steps and serve as blueprints for the initiation and continuation of transition processes in other winter destinations and mountain communities for decreasing the snow-dependency of their respective tourism system, strengthening their resilience regarding CC-induced ecologic & socioeconomic effects.

Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis (p)

Shane Dunne

Our research evaluates the economic impacts of household inaction versus adaptation to river floods, utilising the EU-EMS regional CGE model. We integrate regional damage data, adaptation cost-effectiveness for future climate scenarios, and household flood damage shares to enhance assessment granularity at the NUTS2 level, revealing indirect climate change effects often obscured in national assessments. Calibrating household expenditure data across income quintiles allows accurate estimation of adaptation impacts. We explore various financing options to inform policymakers at regional and national levels. Additionally, we assess the optimal timing for household adaptation, considering each country's capacity to manage climatic and adaptation challenges. Projected direct river-flood losses in Europe by 2100 are €44 billion annually, reducible to €8.1 billion with adaptation. Without adaptation, household flood damages could increase GDP by 0.15\% in 2050 and 0.2\% in 2100 due to forced reconstruction efforts. However, combined damages to firms and households reverse this effect. Household adaptation yields higher national and regional GDP compared to the baseline, with a 0.4\% GDP increase in 2100, translating to an aggregate. Gains are unevenly distributed, with Denmark, Greece, Italy, Croatia, and Germany benefiting most. A government loan system to support household adaptation shows significant positive GDP impacts, particularly in countries previously facing negative GDP responses. The timing of household adaptation is crucial; immediate action is beneficial in some countries, while a delayed approach is better for others. Regional analysis reveals significant disparities in national versus regional outcomes, emphasising the need for region-specific adaptation strategies. Our findings provide actionable insights for policymakers to optimise economic outcomes through strategic household adaptation to river floods

Shane Dunne (p), Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis , Tatiana Filatova, Olga Ivanova

Lisa Sella

Coastal and riverine regions in Europe face increasing threats from sea-level rise (SLR) and river floods exacerbated by climate change. Although economic assessments of these hazards traditionally rely on aggregate metrics at national or continental scales, regional disparities and sectoral specificities remain insufficiently examined. To quantitatively explore these distributional impacts, this paper employs a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model EU-EMS at the NUTS2 level for the EU and the UK. Our approach integrates detailed spatial data on hazard exposure and vulnerability with an intertemporal CGE framework capable of capturing complex economic feedbacks across regions and sectors to estimate both the direct and indirect economic repercussions of combined SLR and river flood events by 2100. In contrast to aggregated studies, this methodology employing fine regional and sectoral resolutions reveals wide heterogeneity in outcomes. Coastal zones incur the largest relative GDP losses due to direct damage from climate-induced SLR, with some heavily exposed regions experiencing declines in the range of 10–20% relative to a no-impact baseline. Meanwhile, significant river flood risks extend into inland regions, potentially driving flood-related losses up to €44 billion annually in a high-end warming scenario without adaptation. These shocks have non-negligible spillover effects in interconnected sectors such as construction, public services, and manufacturing, as businesses grapple with disrupted supply chains, damaged infrastructure, and shifts in consumer demand. By jointly examining these compounding hazards, we show that the path to economic recovery is significantly more constrained than in scenarios where only one hazard is considered. Both SLR-exposed coastal areas and inland regions prone to river flooding require extensive repair efforts from the construction sector. However, capacity constraints within the construction industry—already overtaxed by simultaneous reconstruction demands—create disproportionately large knock-on effects that ripple throughout the wider European economy, magnifying the initial damages. Our findings underscore that spatially differentiated policies are essential to addressing the uneven distribution of climate impacts across Europe. This is crucial when analyzing the effects of compounding hazards jointly, especially when they revert the investments and other economic mechanisms into opposite directions across coastal and inland regional economies . Regions with high exposure to SLR and river floods require targeted, region-specific adaptation strategies that consider local sectoral compositions and vulnerability profiles to meet the challenges of ensuring finance for both covering climate losses and funding climate adaptations.

Lisa Sella (p), Francesca Silvia Rota, Nicola Pollo

Ignasi Cortés Arbués

Climate change represents a global challenge that policymakers urgently need to address by means of integrative frameworks and targeted local solutions that hamper climatic resilience and territorial sustainability. The scientific community can develop inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches that integrate knowledge from different fields and involve stakeholders in co-designing these solutions. In environmental land management, for instance, a growing interest is paid to the effects that land-use change decisions produce on carbon sequestration, greenhouse gasses emissions abatement, and other ecosystem services.
In a socio-ecological perspective, social sciences play a crucial role in understanding the relationships that link socio-economic dynamics and land-use patterns in the perspective of climate mitigation and adaptation. Local stakeholders are fundamental for the successful implementation of nature restoration actions aimed at preserving ecosystem services: their perceptions and preferences can determine both the feasibility and effectiveness of the restoration investments. Thus, the analysis of the social acceptability of different management options becomes more and more crucial. However, many restoration projects fail to deal with the aim of social acceptability assessment in a way that integrates socio-economic analyses and bio-geo-physical research structurally.
This paper provides both a conceptual framework to analyse the social acceptability of restoration options, and an application to coastal wetlands based on the Horizon Europe project RESTORE4Cs (https://www.restore4cs.eu/). The project investigates alternative restoration strategies in six coastal wetlands across Europe (Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, Romania, Lithuania, France). The paper focuses on several factors that can influence stakeholder preferences and social acceptability and methods for measuring them in the context of wetlands.

Ignasi Cortés Arbués (p), Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis, Servaas Storm, Olga Ivanova, Tatiana Filatova

Andrea Omizzolo

European regions are increasingly exposed to climate-induced damages from sea-level rise (SLR) and river floods. Given the localised impact of floods, recent macroeconomic assessments of climate-induced flooding have begun to focus on sub-national regions. This choice of aggregation is appropriate as climate change adaptation processes and measures are implemented at the local level. In this context, recent studies point to the uptake of private adaptation spending across economic sectors, as firms look to mitigate localised damages to their assets directly. However, regional and sectoral disparities are seldom captured, while the adaptation measures included in macroeconomic assessments are almost exclusively restricted to publicly-funded infrastructure projects, like seawalls or river dikes.
Given the growing share of private adaptation across firms and the importance of regional-level assessments in adaptation research, we employ a dynamic multi-sectoral, multi-regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the EU27 and the UK (271 regions, 19 sectors) to assess direct and indirect effects of adaptation in reducing climate-induced damages from floods until 2070. To do this, we combine projected economic damage data for river floods and SLR (obtained from spatially-detailed hazard exposure and vulnerability assessments) with sectoral adaptation investment data from the 28 countries. These data are based on real transactions related to adaptation services, providing valuable representative estimates per sector-region combination. Using these data to calibrate initial adaptation investments, we project two different adaptation uptake scenarios within the model’s time horizon. We then compute adaptation benefits from these investments using national benefit-cost ratios drawn from the literature. These adaptation benefits are used to compute residual damages that shock the European economy.
Overall, our results show significant regional and sectoral disparities in impacts and benefits of adaptation. Unsurprisingly, regions with low initial adaptation uptake and high projected flooding damages, particularly in Southern and Eastern Europe, still experience significant impacts to their economies across all scenario ensembles. Moreover, low adaptation uptake in high-value-added sectors such as manufacturing and trade leads to significant second-order effects, as household incomes fall in vulnerable regions. Our analysis underscores the importance of facilitating autonomous adaptation in flood-vulnerable regions, where sector-specific strategies could minimise systemic risks arising from shocks to high-value-added sectors. This becomes all the more important as damages accumulate over time, further restricting the ability of businesses to adapt to future climate change. Not addressing these adaptation challenges effectively could place further pressure on public budgets through an increased dependence on public adaptation projects.