Denmark keeps on dithering over climate adaptation plans

As a country of islands and peninsulas, climate adaptation in Denmark has all been about water until now — preparing for rising seas and more intense rainfall. Annual precipitation has already increased by 15 percent, while average temperatures have risen 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels.

"Climate change affects different areas differently, but Denmark is generally getting wetter, be it water from above, from the sea, or below, as rising groundwater," explains Adrian Lema, Director at the National Centre for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute DMI.

More water means more flooding, more storm surges, and more cloudbursts. The country experienced a shocking watershed moment in the summer of 2011, when a violent cloudburst led to the heaviest rainfall within a 24 hour period that Denmark has seen in half a century in Copenhagen, causing more than 6 billion Danish Krones (800 million euros) of damages. "July 2011 was a wake-up call,” says Mia Holmbo Lind from the green think tank CONCITO in Copenhagen. “It made climate adaptation the talk of the town.”

Climate attribution research has shown that these extreme weather events have become much more likely in a warming world. “Our research indicates that global warming has already almost doubled the risks of cloudbursts such as the one in 2011, and the likelihood will increase with further warming,” says Lema.

Despite residing in Northern Europe, Denmark is also struggling with more frequent heat waves and droughts. In the summer of 2018 and the spring of 2020, record heat waves struck the country, causing 250 additional deaths in 2018 alone, according to the Danish Ministry of Health.

These changes in the weather bring with them great economic costs, explains Hans Sanderson, a senior scientist with iClimate at the University of Aarhus, and an expert on climate adaptation. “The agricultural sector experienced damages of over six billion DKK (800 million euros) at the last drought in 2018. And we will see more such serious consequences in the coming years."

Looking to the longer term beyond the year 2100, sea level rise will also become a very real problem in Denmark. It is a low-lying country with an average elevation above sea level of only 31 meters. "There is serious uncertainty regarding whether several Danish cities can exist in the year 2300 without substantial adaptation,” says Holmbo. “The sea is coming even if we meet the obligations of the Paris Agreement."

In 2008, Connie Hedegaard, the minister for Climate and Energy at the time, presented a  "Strategy for adaptation to climate change in Denmark." The strategy was focused on gathering information, and resulted in the creation of a national digital climate adaptation platform called klimatilpasning.dk, which has become a knowledge hub on the subject. It was also aimed at furthering Danish research on adaptation, and created a forum to coordinate adaptation efforts between different government departments.

In reaction to the 2011 floods, a national plan was agreed in the following year to handle such events in the future. The "Action Plan for a climate-proof Denmark" was aimed specifically at managing the impacts of cloudbursts and torrential rain, and has been in effect since. Yet it is outdated as it is much too narrow in focus. Therefore, all parties in the Danish Parliament except the far-right Nye Borgerlige, which rejects the climate science outright, have been negotiating an update to the Action Plan, which was supposed to be finished before the November 2022 election. For as yet unknown reasons, the plan hasn’t seen the light of day, and the delay is already starting to have real impacts.

"We have a somewhat arrogant attitude in Denmark when it comes to adaptation. We think we know best, but we risk falling behind," says Holmbo.

In addition to financing problems, a lack of clarity regarding implementation principles is also considered a major hurdle to more effective adaptation measures, Holmbo explains. Partly owing to the delay of the national strategy, there is a huge lack of up-to-date legislation, both at a national level and in municipalities. For example, some municipal zoning legislation looks at flooding, but municipalities aren't obliged to implement the necessary adaptation measures when developing new urban areas.

“Others are developing with their eyes open and are starting to use adaptive planning strategies that can readjust accordingly once future predictions on sea levels and rainfall become clearer. But good planning does not assure implementation when funding and legislation is uncertain,” Holmbo say. At present, many municipalities are holding their breath while awaiting an update of the national strategy, because they are unsure what it will entail, and which subsidies it will provide. 

Currently a lack of deeper knowledge is also a barrier. The Danish Meteorological Institute has developed an interactive Climate Atlas based on updated data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet the atlas only predicts where it rains more, and where storm surges have become more likely. It doesn’t consider where excess rainwater goes, Sanderson continues. "We need better risk analysis. What we have today is too crude to tell us anything about where the real vulnerabilities are."

There is a general lack of awareness among Danish municipalities and regions about the EU’s 2021 approval of an updated climate adaptation strategy which calls for a "climate resilient Europe in 2050," several experts told Clean Energy Wire. The government is yet to define what climate resilience means in a Danish context.