Why climate resilience starts locally

Adaptation needs a planning system

Across Europe, there is no shortage of adaptation knowledge or individual solutions. Cities and regions are developing heat action plans, restoring wetlands, redesigning public spaces, strengthening flood management, adapting infrastructure and improving early warning systems.

But adaptation cannot be delivered through isolated measures. It requires decisions across departments, sectors and levels of government. Climate risk information must be translated into priorities and investment. Citizens and affected communities must have a meaningful role. Progress must be monitored and plans adjusted as risks evolve.

In other words, adaptation needs a process.

This perspective is grounded in ICLEI Europe’s more than 15 years of work with cities, regions and communities on adaptation and resilience.

Standards can make a distinctive contribution here. A good standard does not prescribe the same solution for every place. It provides a common structure through which communities can understand their risks, assign responsibilities, engage stakeholders, prioritize action, mobilize resources and learn from implementation.

This is the purpose of ISO 14092, Climate change adaptation – Requirements and guidance on adaptation planning for local governments and communities. Published in early 2026, it provides a structured framework for local adaptation planning, covering governance, stakeholder engagement, climate risk assessment, implementation, monitoring and continual improvement.

Its publication is an important milestone. But it should also mark the beginning of a wider conversation: How do we ensure that standards become part of the everyday implementation of adaptation?

Standards are informed by the realities of those who have to use them.

Building resilience in communities

For local and regional governments, the challenge is not simply to identify climate risks. They must determine who is responsible for addressing them, how priorities will be set, where finance will come from and how adaptation will be integrated into spatial planning, infrastructure investment and public services. They must also be able to show whether their actions are genuinely reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience.

At ICLEI Europe, we work with cities and regions to bring these different elements together through structured planning. Our role is not simply to help produce another climate strategy, but to strengthen the ability of local governments to understand shocks and stresses, act on risks and accelerate implementation through collaboration, learning and access to finance.

As a partner in several EU-funded projects, ICLEI Europe helps translate that ambition into practical action on the ground. Through Pathways2Resilience, we are helping regions develop transformative climate-resilience pathways, build institutional capacity and create the conditions for investment and implementation. The AdaptationHubs initiative is also strengthening connections between national adaptation priorities and local realities through 27 National Adaptation Hubs across all EU Member States, providing guidance, peer learning and support for multilevel governance.

This practical involvement is also reflected in ICLEI’s formal role in standards development. ICLEI has been the liaison for technical committee ISO/TC 268, Sustainable cities and communities, since 2012 and, since 2020, has chaired its European counterpart, CEN/TC 465. Through these roles, we help bring the experience of cities and communities into standards work, including EN 18140 on the terminology and classification of nature-based solutions and draft CEN/TR 18414 on approaches to territorial resilience.

These experiences point to a central lesson for standards: adaptation is not delivered by a single institution or sector. National governments may establish policy and regulatory frameworks, but local authorities, infrastructure providers, communities, businesses and civil society translate them into practical action. Their efforts must connect.

Making adaptation more investable

Structured planning matters for another reason: finance. Adaptation remains difficult to fund partly because climate risk is often poorly connected to project pipelines, investment decisions and public budgeting. A credible adaptation plan can change that by establishing a transparent chain between risk, priority, intervention, expected outcome and monitoring.

The international standards community already has important building blocks. Alongside ISO 14092, ISO 14090 provides overarching principles for adaptation, ISO 14091 addresses climate-risk assessment and ISO 14093 establishes a mechanism for channelling climate finance to subnational authorities through performance-based resilience grants.

These standards point towards a more coherent architecture linking risk assessment, planning and finance. But they must also work together in practice. A municipal climate officer – who may be responsible for adaptation, climate neutrality and energy with very limited resources – should not have to navigate disconnected standards, frameworks and terminology to move from a risk assessment to a funded programme. Standards should provide a clear path from understanding risk to planning, implementation, finance, monitoring and learning.

This is also where standardization can support trust. Communities need confidence that their knowledge and needs will shape decisions. Public authorities need confidence that priorities are grounded in evidence. Investors need confidence that proposals are credible and outcomes can be measured. A common planning structure can provide that confidence while leaving room for locally appropriate solutions.

Standards shaped by practice

ICLEI Europe’s experience shows that standards development works best when it begins with the realities of those expected to use them. Over the years, we have explored this principle through different projects addressing particular aspects of urban resilience.

In the Smart Mature Resilience project, ICLEI and partners worked with cities to co-create a European Resilience Management Guideline and associated tools. These became the basis for three consensus-based guidance documents published by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), covering operational planning, resilience maturity and an information portal.

Rather than starting with a theoretical definition of what cities should do, the process drew on experience, external expertise and iterative co-creation. This reflected an important principle: Standards are not developed at a distance from implementation; they are informed by the realities of those who have to use them.

ISO 14092 provides a new opportunity to put this principle into action. Its real measure of success will not be publication alone, but what happens next: whether it helps local authorities make better decisions, coordinate responsibilities, unlock investments, engage communities, and protect the people and places most exposed to climate risk.

The next step is therefore to support implementation. Local governments and communities need to be able to understand and apply the standard in ways that reflect their own risks, capacities and priorities. In practice, this means standards that are locally usable, that connect climate adaptation with disaster risk reduction and investment, that support meaningful participation, and that are designed for continual learning as climate risks evolve.

This will require continued cooperation between city networks, national governments, practitioners and funders. It is a conversation I look forward to having in Paris: how to ensure that International Standards provide practical support where resilience is needed – in our cities and communities.

Invest now… or pay later. Join us at the ISO Annual Meeting 2026 to explore how standards can help communities build climate resilience.