Integrating Adaptation to Climate Change into Sustainable Development Policy and Planning

Adaptation to climate change and sustainable development have become core elements of international, European, and national policies and strategies. At worst, adaptation to climate change can trigger negative responses—maladaptation—in terms of raising greenhouse-gas emissions and exacerbating the vulnerability of specific groups of people, which both run counter to sustainable development principles. Thus, the integration of sustainable climate change adaptation objectives into a sustainable development framework can pave the way for planning scenarios, in which resilience intertwines with sustainability. Studies concerning this issue are quite lacking, and methods useful for assessing the relationship ‘adaptation-sustainable development’ are scarcely investigated. In this study, we focus on environmental sustainability and aim at proposing and applying a method for assessing the coherence between climate change adaptation objectives and sustainable development objectives (i.e., national strategic goals) included in the Italian National Adaptation Plan to Climate Change and, respectively, in the National Sustainable Development Strategy. We found that most adaptation objectives appear to be unrelated with national strategic goals, while none of them clearly hinder environmental sustainability, that is, the adaptation objectives are not inclined to promote maladaptation. There is still plenty of room to work on sustainable adaptation objectives to be consistent with sustainable development ones.