From Climate Risk Assessment to Adaptation Priorities: A System-Wide Framework for Climate-Resilient National Energy Planning

National energy planning increasingly needs to account for climate risks, yet adaptation priorities in National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) often remain too generic to guide infrastructure, regulatory, and investment decisions. This paper develops a policy-facing framework for translating energy sector climate risk evidence into ranked adaptation priorities. The framework decomposes the national energy system into supply chains and aggregate element types, combines stakeholder-derived system importance weights with multi-hazard exposure and vulnerability scores, and derives a relative impact ranking. Exposure is represented through hazard magnitude, frequency, and spatial prevalence, while vulnerability is assessed through expert-based sensitivity and adaptive capacity scores. The framework is demonstrated for Slovenia, covering electricity, gas, liquid fuels, solid fuels, and district heat as part of the country’s first national sectoral climate vulnerability and risk assessment for energy. The results identify electricity transmission and distribution networks, liquid fuel import and logistics infrastructure, gas imports and transmission, and selected storage and conversion assets as priority areas. In the RCP8.5 climate stress case, exposure rises substantially for floods, heat, landslides, and wildfires. Monte Carlo robustness checks indicate that the core set of high-priority element types remains stable. The paper contributes a system-wide screening approach for integrating climate risk knowledge into climate-resilient energy planning, adaptable to different national contexts.