Climate adaptation is too important to work in silos. Here’s what we discovered in our first year and an invitation to join us.
Twelve months ago, the FAIR2Adapt project set out with an ambitious goal: make climate adaptation knowledge truly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable across Europe. We wanted to help regional and local authorities build resilience against climate change by making it easier to share and reuse adaptation knowledge.
Now, at the end of Year One, we’re taking stock. Not with the polished optimism that project reports sometimes demand, but with honesty about where we are—because that’s how real collaboration starts.
What we set out to do
FAIR2Adapt brings together 18 partners from 13 countries to work on applying FAIR principles to climate change adaptation data and knowledge. We’re working with six diverse case studies, from Arctic radioisotope monitoring to urban flood risk in Hamburg, from coastal ecosystem management in France to national adaptation planning in Portugal.
The idea is straightforward. Climate adaptation knowledge exists in fragments—in municipal reports, scientific papers, monitoring datasets, and the lived experience of practitioners. Making this knowledge FAIR means a city planner in Seville could learn from Hamburg’s urban heat work. A Portuguese adaptation hub could draw on systematic reviews from across Europe. An Arctic research team could share their methods in ways others can actually reuse.
What actually happened
We achieved what we set out to do. Workshops completed across all six case studies. FAIR awareness training delivered. Technical frameworks specified. An External Advisory Board established. A strategic partnership forged with our sister project CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC. Communities that started the year uncertain about FAIR ended it ready to put it into practice.
But here’s what we learned that matters more than any checklist: our communities came into this project with real hopes about what FAIR could do for them—and after a year, those hopes haven’t yet connected to their experience.
This isn’t because they didn’t engage. They did. They attended workshops, completed FAIR awareness training, learned about metadata, wrote user stories, built FAIR Implementation Profiles. They did everything we asked.
But there’s a gap. The FAIR they imagined — where their data becomes more discoverable, where knowledge flows more easily, where someone else’s work becomes genuinely reusable for their own adaptation challenges — doesn’t yet match the FAIR they’ve experienced, which has mostly involved responding to technical questions from us.
We were asking communities to be respondents to our process. What we should have been doing — and what Year Two must do — is showing them how FAIR actually serves the hopes they started with.
What we’ve built
Across our case studies, we now have communities who understand FAIR and are ready to apply it. Our Arctic radioisotopes team has made strong progress with the technical framework. The RiOMar team in France invested in stakeholder engagement and understood early what their coastal communities needed. Hamburg and Bremen have municipal stakeholders with concrete adaptation decisions to make—exactly the kind of real-world grounding that makes FAIR meaningful.
The groundwork is solid. What comes next is connecting the technical pieces to the questions communities actually want to answer.
What Year Two looks like
This is where it gets interesting.
We’re shifting from “FAIR as a process we lead” to “FAIR as something communities own.”
In March 2026, we’ll demonstrate four concrete FAIR solutions at our General Assembly:
- A data processing pipeline for coastal water quality modelling that makes simulation outputs genuinely reusable
- A GIS workflow for urban climate risk assessment designed to be replicated across cities
- A pipeline for extracting and structuring knowledge from scientific publications
- A systematic review approach that compares manual and AI-assisted extraction methods
These aren’t demonstrations of technology. They’re demonstrations of value. Each one starts from a real question that adaptation practitioners actually have and shows how FAIR approaches help answer it.
We expect these demonstrators to spark conversations that go both ways. When communities see concrete examples, they’ll tell us what’s missing, what doesn’t fit their reality, and what they’d actually need. And they might see possibilities none of us had considered—connections between datasets, questions they didn’t know they could ask, workflows that could work differently.
An invitation: Join the Thematic Working Group
This challenge is not unique to FAIR2Adapt. It’s one we increasingly see across FAIR, EOSC, and climate service initiatives.
Together with CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC, we’re launching a Thematic Working Group on FAIR for Climate Change Adaptation Data Management in 2026. This working group operates within the MIP4Adapt Community of Practice—the community supporting the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change.
At this stage, we’re particularly looking for people who are already working on FAIR principles in the climate adaptation space. We want to learn from your experiences.
One question sits at the centre of what we’re grappling with: how do you move communities from being respondents to FAIR processes to being owners of FAIR solutions?
We’ve learned that explaining FAIR principles isn’t enough. Communities can understand what FAIR means and still not see how it helps them. The shift we need—and that we suspect others are working on too—is making adaptation practitioners the drivers of FAIRification, not the recipients of it.
So we’re curious:
- How have you approached this in your own work?
- What’s helped communities see FAIR as something that serves their needs rather than a compliance exercise?
- What approaches have worked for making adaptation data FAIR—and what hasn’t?
- How do you bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and practical usefulness?
The goal isn’t to start from scratch—it’s to capitalise on existing knowledge. We know we’re not the only ones facing these challenges, and we’d rather learn from what others have tried than reinvent wheels.
If you’ve been working on FAIR data management for climate services, adaptation planning, or related domains, we’d value your perspective. Even if your experience has been “we tried X and it didn’t work”—that’s exactly the kind of insight that helps everyone move forward.
Other ways to connect
If you’re working on adaptation in a European city or region, we’re identifying transfer cases—opportunities to apply what we’re learning in new contexts. The City of Graz is already in conversation with us. Others are welcome.
If you’re involved in EOSC, we’re thinking about how climate adaptation communities fit within the emerging EOSC Node ecosystem. CCA is inherently cross-disciplinary—spanning environmental science, urban planning, public health, and more. We’d value perspectives on how thematic communities like ours can ensure our needs are addressed.
If you’re simply curious, follow our progress. We publish openly, we share our challenges alongside our successes, and we believe that honest collaboration produces better outcomes than polished isolation.
Looking ahead
Year One taught us that FAIR infrastructure means nothing if communities don’t own it. Year Two is about proving that ownership creates value.
We’ll know we’ve succeeded when a municipal planner can find Hamburg’s flood risk methods and adapt them for their own city. When a systematic review in Portugal automatically connects to the global adaptation knowledge base. When the question shifts from “what is FAIR?” to “what else could we do with this?”
Climate change adaptation is urgent, complex, and fundamentally collaborative. Knowledge that stays locked in institutional silos—even well-organised silos—doesn’t help the communities that need it most.
Join us in making it work.
Get involved:
- 🌐 Visit: fair2adapt-eosc.eu
- 🤝 Express interest in the TWG: Reach out via our website https://fair2adapt-eosc.eu/#contacts
- 📰 Follow our updates on the website and social media
FAIR2Adapt is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under grant agreement No. 101188256.
