Across the Mediterranean, climate adaptation is no longer a distant policy ambition. Communities, cities, farmers, water managers, and governments are already contending with a warmer, drier, and more erratic climate. Droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and rising seas are no longer isolated events. They interact with stressed water systems, strained ecosystems, fragile institutions, and social inequalities, producing socio-environmental crises that are increasingly difficult to manage and recover from.
In response, an impressive ecosystem of digital tools has emerged from scientific and practice-oriented communities: climate data portals, risk-screening platforms, vulnerability assessments, decision-support systems, early-warning services, and planning frameworks. Their promise is compelling, to translate complex climate and socio-economic information into accessible knowledge and practical guidance that can move adaptation from planning to action.
But as our team began working together through FutureMed, a COST Action network that bridges climate science, policy, and practice across the Mediterranean, we kept returning to a deceptively simple question: are these tools actually helping people adapt?
That question became our paper, Promises and pitfalls of climate adaptation tools across the Mediterranean. Rather than developing yet another tool, we decided to pause and examine the landscape that already exists. Who are these tools designed for? What places and sectors do they cover? And are they aligned with the messy realities of adaptation in practice?
Taking stock of a crowded landscape
Answering these questions took the collective effort of more than fifty researchers and practitioners from over twenty countries around the Mediterranean and beyond. Together we compiled an inventory of 122 adaptation tools, from global platforms to national services. Each tool was independently assessed by two to three reviewers against a common framework covering geographic scope, sectoral focus, intended users, methods, outputs, usability, language options, integration potential, validation, cost, and maintenance, and the entries were then harmonized by experts.
This design let us look beyond the promise of individual tools and ask a more uncomfortable question: is the current tool ecosystem actually aligned with the needs, capacities, and decision contexts of those adapting to climate change in the Mediterranean?
Available to everyone, usable by few
One of our clearest findings is that access, in the narrow sense, is not the main barrier: 89% of the tools are free, and nearly all are publicly available. The deeper challenge is alignment, whether a tool fits the users, the languages, and the real decisions it is meant to serve.
Most tools are designed for institutional and technical users: policymakers, municipal and local governments, private-sector professionals, and researchers. Communities, NGOs, and educators are far less frequently targeted, even though they are often closest to implementation and may need practical support the most.
Many tools also demand more expertise than their “user-friendly” label suggests, requiring users to interpret climate models, statistical indicators, geospatial data, and embedded assumptions. What is manageable for a well-resourced research institute can become a wall for a small municipality or civil-society organization with limited staff and time.
And then there is language. Nearly all tools (97.5%) are available in English, while support for other languages drops sharply; Arabic, for example, is offered by barely 3%. In a region as linguistically diverse as the Mediterranean, this creates an uneven geography of access, felt most acutely across the southern and eastern shores.
A Mediterranean mismatch
The Mediterranean is warming around 20% faster than the global average, yet only 10 of the 122 tools were explicitly designed for the region. Many global and European platforms do cover it, but few reflect its sub-regional realities: the adaptation challenges of the northern Mediterranean are not those of the south or the east. A tool may technically cover a place and still miss the governance conditions, data gaps, livelihood systems, and resource conflicts that shape adaptation there.
We also found that tools are overwhelmingly organized around administrative units rather than the watersheds, ecosystems, and landscapes where climate risks actually unfold. Catchment-based tools, arguably the most natural framing for a water-stressed region, were almost absent from the inventory. This is understandable, as planning and funding follow municipalities, regions, and countries. But droughts, floods, and wildfires do not respect institutional borders.
What should change?
Our conclusion is that the next generation of adaptation tools should be judged less by their technical sophistication and more by whether they are usable, inclusive, context-aware, and connected to real decision processes.
That means co-developing tools with end users, not only for them; making assumptions explicit; integrating local and citizen-generated data; supporting multilingual interfaces; and offering clearer guidance on which tool suits which problem. In many cases, users do not need new tools at all - they need better ways to navigate, compare, and apply what already exists.
It also requires a shift in incentives. Building a new tool is more visible, and more fundable, than maintaining or evaluating an existing one. The result is what some scholars call a “cemetery of tools”: platforms launched with promise but abandoned once project funding ends. Adaptation is a long-term socio-environmental process shaped by uncertainty, shifting institutions, and unequal power dynamics; tools that ignore this complexity risk becoming disconnected from practice or reinforcing the very inequalities they are meant to address.
Who gets to use adaptation tools?
Perhaps the most important lesson from this work is that adaptation tools are never merely technical. They shape what we see, what we measure, and which solutions appear possible - and in doing so they influence who adapts, who benefits, and who is left behind. A tool may be technologically brilliant, but that matters little if only a few privileged actors can use it.
The question, then, is not only which tools we have, but who can use them, in which contexts, and with what consequences. The challenge ahead is not to produce more adaptation tools, but to build an ecosystem that supports their use, especially by those who need them most.
To keep that conversation going, we have made the full inventory openly available as a living resource at adapt-tools.org, with the underlying dataset on Zenodo. We hope researchers, practitioners, and tool developers across the Mediterranean, and beyond, will use it, challenge it, and help it grow.