The Belgian National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy describes the impact of climate change in Belgium and underlines the necessary action to fight it. Both on the local level as on the sector-specific level, the sense of urgency has inspired many people to take action in fields as diverse as health, tourism, agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, ecosystems, water, coastal, marine, and tidal areas, production systems and physical infrastructure. To cope with the climatic changes, they started to construct monitoring schemes, build physical barriers, and induce changes in people’s behavior. The Belgian National Climate Commission (composed of representatives from the Belgian federal government and the regional governments of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels) created a working group to develop a joint Belgian Adaptation Strategy. The Strategy will have three objectives: to provide coherence between the existing Belgian adaptation activities (evaluations of the impact and vulnerability to climate change, as well as adaptation measures already implemented); to better communicate on a national, European and international level; to start developing a National Adaptation Plan. Climate change impacts different sectors such as health, tourism, agriculture; forestry; biodiversity, ecosystem, water, coastal, marine, and tidal areas. So the National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy thought the National Climate Commission comes out with an outline.In order to further guide the work towards a National Adaptation Plan, the following objectives are identified:Centralise and coordinate information and actions concerning adaptation while respecting the competences of the different parties; Provide information to avoid a fragmented picture or maladaptation by exchanging the information and search for the cross link connections; Make relevant parties more susceptible to take up their part in the adaptation process by giving them higher visibility. This higher visibility will promote also exchange between parties, thereby ultimately leading to a more complete and coherent adaptation policy; Prioritise adaptation initiatives (based on impacts, vulnerability assessment and adaptive capacity).
بلجيكا · 2010-01-01