Facing heat extremes: lessons learned from 15 years of climate change adaptation in Portugal
Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes, University of Lisbon
ClimRisk, CE3C, Faculty of Sciences, U Lisbon
Presentation at the CE3C Annual Meeting, Azores - Portugal *10-12 October 2025* The first Portuguese National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change was adopted in 2010, aiming to adjust climate and other sectoral policies, and to increase the countries’ resilience to observed and projected climate change impacts. Since then, many resources (e.g. policy documents, scientific articles, data sets) relevant for national adaptation have been published, yet often remain unknown to, or inaccessible, for the multiple stakeholders that comprise the climate adaptation community (CCA) in Portugal. The application of FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) principles to these resources has the potential to improve their discoverability, accessibility, and usability and ultimately promote a more effective climate adaptation planning in Portugal. This study explores the state of the art of scientific research on climate change adaptation in Portugal since 2010, to assess strengths and limitations of knowledge, identifying key priority areas for future research and the “FAIRification” of these resources. As the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events in Portugal increases, this study focused on heat-related hazards, and associated impacts. A systematic search was performed across Scopus and ISI Web of Science to identify relevant peer-reviewed articles between January 2010 and May 2025. The resulting publications were analysed by geographical scope, adaptation sectorial focus, knowledge sector, climate hazard and CCA needs. Alignment of the current scientific outputs with FAIR principles was also analysed. A total of 217 articles were reviewed. Research was mostly performed at the city or national level (37% each) and the majority of adaptation actions were done under the agricultural or urban sectors (19% and 26%, respectively). Research was multidisciplinary, covering different knowledge sectors, from health impacts to biodiversity, buildings and construction, and often included several knowledge sectors in the same article. All articles presented accessible metadata but only one made its scripts and data available for further replication. Results show that scientific research on heat-related climate change adaptation in Portugal is diverse and covers many knowledge areas, but the availability of its data needs improvement. Further work will include policy FAIR assessment of policy documents and datasets. This work was developed under the Horizon Europe project FAIR2ADAPT.
Simões, Francisca, Ines Gomes Marques, and Tiago Capela Lourenço. "Facing heat extremes: lessons learned from 15 years of climate change adaptation in Portugal." ROHub. Oct 13 ,2025. https://w3id.org/ro-id/302b4ebf-db38-49d5-8ab4-4561181f4e94.
CE3C - Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes
Science and technology/Technology and engineering/IT-computer sciences
Since then, many resources (e.g. policy documents, scientific articles, data sets) relevant for national adaptation have been published, yet often remain unknown to, or inaccessible, for the multiple stakeholders that comprise the climate adaptation community (CCA) in Portugal.
Results show that scientific research on heat-related climate change adaptation in Portugal is diverse and covers many knowledge areas, but the availability of its data needs improvement.
Facing heat extremes: lessons learned from 15 years of climate change adaptation in Portugal.