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The Stockholm Environment Institute's 'Systemic climate adaptation framework' is a normative and analytical guide designed to help policymakers and practitioners move beyond fragmented, hazard-based approaches to climate adaptation. It provides a structure of three core pillars and six guiding principles to ensure adaptation policy is coherent, equitable, and robust under deep uncertainty.

This report by the Stockholm Environment Institute examines the gap between the recognition of systemic climate risks—interconnected risks across hazards, sectors, and borders—and their operationalization in adaptation governance. Through a comparative analysis of Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States, the authors find that while systemic language is increasingly present in high-level strategies, day-to-day decision-making, funding, and mandates remain fragmented and focused on individual hazards or sectors. The report proposes a conceptual framework for systemic adaptation based on systemic risk framing, policy interlinkages, and the management of deep uncertainty.

This policy brief, produced as part of the European Commission FP7 funded MEDIATION project, evaluates Robust Decision Making (RDM) as a decision support tool for climate change adaptation. RDM focuses on identifying strategies that perform well across a wide range of plausible futures—prioritizing 'robustness' over 'optimality'—particularly in situations of 'deep uncertainty' where probabilistic data is scarce.