Portugal invests millions in adapting to climate change

Carrie Marie Bratley in Portugal News Online:  The Portuguese government has announced it will be investing €3.5 million in the development of a programme created specifically to promote measures and projects that will help the country adapt to climatic changes.

The funds are to be invested in a new programme named AdaPT – Adapting Portugal to Climate Change – which aims to promote ways of adjusting to the effects of climate change on a local level as well as raising awareness and educating people about the phenomenon. The money will also be used to fund pilot-projects among priority sectors within the National Strategy for the Adaptation to Climatic Changes (ENAAC).

“With the AdaPT programme we intend to contribute towards a greater ability to assess vulnerabilities to climate change and raise awareness and educate within that matter”, said Jorge Moreira da Silva, Minister for the Environment, Land Ordinance and Energy, during an international conference held last week in Lisbon.

Commenting on the news, Filipe Duarte Santos, a leading Portuguese specialist in climate change and teacher at Lisbon University’s Faculty of Sciences, told The Portugal News that rolling out the programme “could be the beginning of a process of adaptation to climate changes on a national level.” “The new AdaPT programme will be very important to inform and raise awareness among people and institutions of the need that we have to adapt to a changing climate”, he said.

In the researcher’s opinion, the programme is “well-designed and well-financed and responds to the country’s current needs in terms of adapting to climate change. “It could have been started earlier, but I believe we are now on the right path”, he added.

...The specialist believes that Portugal and other southern European countries, such as Spain, Italy and Greece, are among the most vulnerable to climate change in Europe. He says future scenarios will see less rain in southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and more extreme weather phenomena will become more frequent worldwide....

Roofs in Lisbon, shot by islandjoe, Wikimedia Commons in Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license