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The project, "Policy Mix for an Updated Adaptation Action Plan," aimed at developing science-based recommendations for the update to the Adaptation Action Plan of the German Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change. The focus was on the compilation and evaluation of potential adaptation measures and political instruments to further their implementation. The final report of this project is available for download.

The report focuses on the methodology for the evaluation and prioritization of measures and instruments for adaptation to climate change that were developed in the project. Based on state-of-the-art approaches in the national and international debate on adaptation, evaluation criteria such as "cost", "acceptance" or "synergies and conflicts with other policy fields" were further refined and operationalized to make them suitable for use.

While detailed studies and methodologies are available regarding costs and benefits of climate adaptation measures, transaction costs of related political instruments have so far been investigated less. For this reason the project had an emphasis on further developing methodologies to estimate economic costs of the implementation of instruments. Such costs were defined as those associated with designing an instrument in the policy-making process, introducing and implementing the instrument, administrative costs associated with the continuous operation of the instrument, as well as monitoring and enforcement costs.

As a result, relatively low implementation costs were found to be associated with cooperations and voluntary agreements, information and knowledge management, as well as research funding. High implementation costs, in contrast, are likely to be associated with monitoring systems and data collection, as well as newly developed funding schemes. Within individual types of instruments, implementation costs can considerably vary depending on whether they can be implemented within existing structures or need to be completely newly introduced. Furthermore, costs depend on how many administrative levels (federal, federal-state and/or municipal) are involved.

An Excel tool called "PrioSet" was developed by the project in order to apply the multi-criteria evaluation method to recommendations for adaptation measures and instruments arising from the project. As a result, the project was able to identify and propose a core set of high-priority adaptation measures and accompanying policy instruments. In conclusion, further applications and limitations of the evaluation method are discussed. Additionally, the results from an online survey focused on expectations surrounding the updated Adaptation Action Plan are presented.

The report is written in German but contains an English-language summary.