This report accompanies the Commission's White Paper on Adaptation to Climate Change. Its objective is to raise the profile of adaptation and to build a coherent approach at institutional level across the EU. It is primarily a taking-stock exercise, reviewing the literature and gathering the views of services and stakeholders, on the basis of the 2007 Green Paper. It also serves as a reference framework to develop an EU adaptation policy in future. It is a crosscutting exercise and is complemented by sectoral papers on water, coasts, agriculture and health. It introduces the overall adaptation approaches, then refers to the specific actions to be undertaken in the short term.