Promises and Pitfalls of Climate Adaptation Tools across the Mediterranean

Abstract

Abstract Although tools for climate change adaptation have proliferated, there is relatively little evidence about who they are intended to serve and how well they are suited to respond to decision contexts. We synthesized an inventory of 122 tools and found that around 73% of these are relevant to adaptation in the Mediterranean. We then examined who they are designed for, what they support, and how well they are suited to respond to decision contexts. We argue that access is not the main challenge, but alignment is. The results show that tools operate in isolation, often bound to administrative rather than physical boundaries, and provide limited guidance for choosing appropriate applications. Multilingual support and pathways to integrate local data are uneven. We outline actionable directions to improve this developing ecosystem, including linking tools to each other and to planning processes, making assumptions explicit, and involving anticipated users in the design process. These steps can turn a large and growing supply of tools into a more coherent, context-aware, and usable resource for adaptation and planning across the Mediterranean.