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This technical report describes a case study on policy for adaptation to climate change delivered to DG-CLIMA. It is aimed at exploring climate change adaptation scenarios as well as concrete actions to increase climatic resilience in a small European island: Tenerife, Canary Islands (Spain), the largest and most populated of the seven islands of the Canaries. The effects of climatic and non-climatic hazards on local population health and ecosystems are reviewed, such as heatwaves, air pollution and the atmospheric dust which comes from the Saharan dessert. The potential combination or overlapping effects of these hazards are also explored.

One of the findings of the analysis is that there is a lack of institutions in charge of climate change policy issues. According to most of the participants, the Islands need an institutional structure in charge of mainstreaming climate change policy into private and public institutions. A second finding indicates that an integrated climate change risk management plan is also needed as well as the investment in high-resolution regional climatic models. The following part of this study will be devoted to build scenarios for Tenerife. As it emerged from the present study, local citizens are not only concerned about adaptation to climate change, but also about how to be more resilient against external shocks, including extreme weather events as a consequence of climate change. Thus, those scenarios, still to be built, will propose paths that Tenerife may walk through from current times to 2040 in order to increase its resilience. These scenarios would concentrate on energy, agriculture, and food dependency, as well as other driving forces that might affect Tenerife’s resilience.