A lot of good adaptation is invisible on purpose. You do not notice the basement that did not flood, or the extra trees that quietly drop the temperature a few degrees. A water square is just a sunken playground until the day it swallows a downpour. When it works, nothing dramatic happens, so it is easy to assume nothing happened at all.
But a lot of it isn’t there
The less comforting answer is that the planning is often thinner than it looks. In most European countries a city is not even required to make a climate plan. Coverage is patchy as a result. In the Netherlands, only 128 of 342 municipalities had a dedicated heat plan by mid-2026, the document that sets out how to help vulnerable people when it gets dangerously hot.
And where a plan does exist, it often does not hold together. Diana Reckien, a climate researcher at the University of Twente, measured exactly this alignment between different parts of an adaptation plan across 167 European cities. In nearly 70% of the cities, some parts of the adaptation plan contradicted each other.
For example, a city would name heat as a danger, but then list no measure against it. Or it would plant trees and build without checking which risk it was solving. “Cities often tick the boxes for having adaptation plans,” says Diana. “But when you look closely, many plans are misaligned or incomplete.”
The people the plans forget
There is a pattern in who gets left out. The people who suffer most in a heatwave are often the least protected. Think of the elderly, children, and people in poorly insulated homes, which often coincides with low-income households.
Diana found that only 1% of cities genuinely involve such groups in the plan-making process. “Climate adaptation has to go beyond paperwork,” she says. “Without consistent, inclusive and evidence-based planning, we risk leaving our most vulnerable communities behind.”
The good news is that the fix is known. Diana and her team built a kind of measuring stick that shows a city where its plan falls apart, before the money is spent. So the real test is not whether your city has a plan. It is whether you would feel the difference on the next hot day. For Diana, a plan that protects people starts in an obvious place. “It starts with the question of who you want to protect.”
