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The Global Goal on Adaptation aims to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change. Given the impact of climate-related hazards, the question is not whether adaptation is necessary, but what are the adaptation options to increase resilience.

Notwithstanding the extremely important efforts to keep global warming well below 2 °C, as set out in the Paris Agreement, adaptation is a necessity. The Global Goal on Adaptation, established in the Paris Agreement, aims to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change. Given the impact of climate-related hazards, as well as of slow-onset events (such as sea-level rise), the question is not whether adaptation is necessary, but what are the adaptation options to increase resilience.

Adaptation policies need to be developed to avoid or reduce the negative impact of the current and future climate. Details of the impact of climate-related hazards can be found in various EEA products, such as reports (e.g. EEA, 2017b), indicators (e.g. EEA, 2019d), and novel formats like story maps (e.g. EEA, 2020). Unlike climate change mitigation, there is no universal unit of measurement for adaptation. The perceptions of effectiveness and even success vary. Focusing on national-level adaptation and measuring the change in overall vulnerability may leave open the questions 'vulnerability of whom?', 'to what?' and 'who decides?', which is likely to lead to the views of local, less powerful stakeholders and especially vulnerable groups being obscured (Dilling et al., 2019).

The central question remains: 'Are we getting more resilient?' Nowadays, none of the adaptation policies and frameworks fully answers that question. Increased awareness of adaptation is, however, often seen as a proxy for increased adaptive capacity and one of the elements used to measure the success of adaptation policies.