EU-backed taxonomy maps the overlapping vocabularies of climate adaptation and disaster risk

Researchers and practitioners in climate adaptation and in disaster risk reduction often use different words for closely related ideas ^[2]. An adaptation practitioner might write "adaptive capacity" where a disaster-risk specialist writes "coping capacity" or "preparedness" ^[2]. The release announcing the taxonomy calls these related but not interchangeable, since they reflect different perspectives, values, disciplines, timescales and ways of understanding risk ^[2].

That distinction drives the design. The taxonomy maps connections between such terms and preserves their separate meanings, instead of forcing them into one vocabulary ^[3].

The collection is curated by AI tools and people together ^[4]. It runs the Climate Connectivity Hub, a search and discovery tool that pulls in content from weADAPT, CORDIS, PreventionWeb, Climate-ADAPT and the Resilience Platform ^[5]. A dynamic listing of its terms is public ^[16].

The release does not give the taxonomy's size or say whether the February paper measured any gain in retrieval. It describes that paper as demonstrating how taxonomies can advance FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) knowledge management for adaptation platforms ^[10]. I'd want the same queries run across the five platforms ^[17] with and without the term links, and practitioners from both fields scoring what comes back.

The people behind the project describe the gap as one of connection. "We don't lack knowledge on climate adaptation. We struggle to connect it," said Anne Fouilloux, FAIR2Adapt's project coordinator and chief technology officer at LifeWatch ERIC ^[12].

Sukaina Bharwani, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute's Oxford Centre and the paper's lead author, has worked on weADAPT for almost 20 years ^{[15] [14]}. She said she "was always frustrated by the inability of the many great knowledge platforms out there to work together" ^[14]. "Supporting interoperability between platforms is a step toward building on existing knowledge, instead of reinventing the wheel," she said ^[13].