10 Dec 2025
Through this award, the European Research Council (ERC) supports excellent researchers with a grant of up to two million euros for a period of five years to help them expand and consolidate their innovative research.
Goals and targets for climate change adaptation
Professor Matthias Garschagen is Chair of Human Geography with a Focus on Human-Environment Relations and coordinating lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities.
Even though climate impacts are sharply increasing, current adaptation is not fast or deep enough. This applies particularly to adaptation frontiers such as coastal cities. At the same time, we lack the knowledge as to whether and how adaptation goals and concrete targets – used in climate change mitigation and other policy fields – can improve the situation. We also lack a coherent scientific method to evaluate and set targets, despite increasing calls from adaptation advocates and practitioners.
With his project GOALT (Goals and targets for climate change adaptation: Risks, opportunities, design, application and impact), Matthias Garschagen plans to close these gaps. First, he will seek to establish a new theoretical framework to explain under which conditions goals and targets can improve adaptation action.
Secondly, he will create empirical knowledge on how actors negotiate and act on concrete targets – drawing on a first of its kind global assessment, in-depth analyses, and novel gaming simulations piloted in four coastal cities: Hamburg, Mumbai, Manila, and Cape Town.
Building on this, he will develop an integrated model to examine the desirability, feasibility, and impact of potential goals and targets under various conditions. Using the generated insights, he will then develop the first comprehensive methodology to guide adaptation goals and targets and examine its transfer to other contexts. “I expect that GOALT outcomes will become a reference point for adaptation research and allow for a step-change in adaptation policy and action,” says Garschagen.