WRI Publications Feed: Vulnerability and Adaptation

Information for Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons and Needs in South Asia

Sarah Parsons — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:21:39 -0400

Ideally, adaptation information will be tailored to meet the needs of individual information users. However, in many cases, information is supply-driven, shaped in large part by the interests of researchers and the limited data available to them. In these cases, it’s oftentimes challenging for users to access, understand, and apply the information available to them. To support effective adaptation over the long term, improved systems for producing, managing, using, disseminating, and learning from information in South Asia are needed. Significant new capacities will likely need to be developed to meet these needs.

This paper served as background for a South Asian regional workshop, which brought together adaptation information users and producers, as well as climate change experts. The workshop aimed to inform likely new investments in the information base for climate adaptation. Convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Development Alternatives, with support from the UK Department for International Development, the workshop intended to identify:

priorities for information investment,
opportunities for improving information use, and
mechanisms for deepening dialogue between information users and producers in the region.

This paper aimed to support progress toward these workshop objectives by:

identifying barriers to effective information production, access, and application in the South Asian region;
posing a practical vocabulary for characterizing relevant information types;
articulating a concise set of uses for adaptation information; and
raising a set of critical issues around which to frame workshop discussions.

The paper draws on desk and interview research conducted by WRI from November 2011 through February 2012, as well as feedback obtained from a roundtable event held on the margins of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties-17 in Durban, South Africa.

Ready or Not: Assessing National Institutional Capacity for Climate Change Adaptation

Kevin Lustig — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:22:25 -0500

Executive Summary

Effective institutions are at the heart of our ability to respond to growing climate risks. Governments and other institutions at the national level can play a critical role in increasing society’s capacity to adjust and readjust (i.e., “adaptive capacity”) as conditions shift and as new climate change knowledge emerges.
As national policymakers, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiators, international funders, and others develop methods and guidelines for adaptation planning, it is critical that they include a focus on building national institutions that can support ongoing adaptation.
The NAC framework provides a practical approach for understanding the institutional aspects of adaptive capacity. NAC assessments can support planning through the identification of specific gaps in capacity that can be filled through investment and action.
The NAC framework evaluates national institutions’ performance of five key functions critical to adaptation: assessment, prioritization, coordination, information management, and climate risk management. The NAC treats performance of these functions as an indication of a country’s overall adaptive capacity.
The pilot applications of the framework in Bolivia, Ireland, and Nepal suggest that the NAC framework is useful across a range of countries and that it can be tailored to specific country contexts. The pilots used the NAC framework in the following ways:
- As a tool for monitoring and baseline setting. The NAC assessment in Bolivia led to the development of country-specific indicators and metrics for use in adaptation policy.
- As a tool to catalyze action and fill key capacity gaps. The Irish NAC assessment identified gaps in capacity, helping to build an evidence base for targeting new research and development efforts. It also inspired the Irish Environmental Protection Agency to commission a national vulnerability assessment.
- As a tool to gather and synthesize resources. The NAC framework can provide a practical structure for organizing a diverse and often scattered body of adaptation-relevant information and resources. This proved particularly useful in Nepal and Bolivia.
The country teams that applied the NAC framework in Bolivia, Ireland, and Nepal used distinctly different approaches to completing their assessments and also formatted their findings differently. This indicates that the NAC framework can be tailored for use in a variety of different planning or evaluation processes.

World Resources Report 2010-2011: Decision Making in a Changing Climate

Maggie Barron — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:13:29 -0400

Recent extreme weather events including floods, heat waves, and droughts present a vivid image of the direction the world is heading. As climate change intensifies, more events like these, combined with longer-term changes in the climate’s average state - including rising seas, melting glaciers, and shifting precipitation patterns — will have profound impacts on people, ecosystems and infrastructure.

Together, these changes call for different approaches to planning and policymaking, enabling societies to adapt effectively to a much hotter tomorrow.

World Resources Report 2010-2011: Decision Making in a Changing Climate is a major resource to help developing country national-level officials make decisions that support communities and economic sectors to become more climate resilient.

Based on input from more than 100 experts in 36 countries, the report offers specific, practical strategies and innovative case studies to inform how to integrate climate change risks into national policies and planning.

It also provides recommendations in five key public policy areas for developing country government officials and donor agencies: public engagement , decision-relevant information, institutional design, tools for planning and policymaking, and resources.

Produced by the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute, WRR 2010-2011 is essential reading for policy makers, donors, and decision makers who must start now to prepare for a changing world.

Making Adaptation Count: Concepts and Options for Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Adaptation

Kevin Lustig — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:07:25 -0400

This report was made possible with support from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Executive Summary

Adaptation, Development, and Monitoring and Evaluation

The impacts of climate change increasingly threaten the achievement of poverty reduction and other development objectives, including the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Research suggests that impacts over the course of the 21st century, if unaddressed, could cause a 5–10 percent loss in global gross domestic product (GDP), with poor countries’ wealth declining in excess of 10 percent.¹ Even more significant are the potential threats to human security – reduced agricultural production, heightened water scarcity, exposure to droughts, floods, storms, and diseases.²

As developing country governments and their international partners grow increasingly aware of these threats, they are turning to options for adapting to climate change in the development context. However, the national, sectoral, and project-based adaptation plans and policies now emerging are largely in their infancy and relatively untested. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of such initiatives, as they are implemented across the developing world, will be critically important for judging their effectiveness and making decisions on which efforts to scale up as climate impacts intensify. Industrialized countries and donor agencies channeling billions of dollars into adaptation finance, including under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will require such systems as an important dimension to the adaptation initiatives they support.

About This Publication

This paper aims to provide adaptation and development practitioners with a practical framework for developing M&E systems that can track the success and failure of adaptation initiatives in the development context. It is based upon a series of convenings, case studies, and interviews conducted by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In particular, the authors reviewed M&E systems in the planning and implementation stages for several relevant GIZ and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau Bankengruppe (KfW or German Development Bank) natural resource management and adaptation projects in India.

We expect adaptation M&E practice will evolve substantially in the years ahead. We offer this guidance in the hope that capturing early lessons in adaptation can propel future successful efforts. This paper addresses the planning, design, and early implementation stages of adaptation interventions. The key framework can also serve as a basis for funders and their partners to develop or analyse programmatic agendas, formulate evaluation questions, or supplement guidance on M&E in a specific sector or thematic area.

The core principles presented in this report center around the importance of M&E as a tool to shape successful adaptation efforts. We also recognize, however, that M&E can serve other useful purposes. For example, it can help identify positive synergies between efforts towards adaptation and other objectives, such as economic growth or climate change mitigation.

The guidance presented here is limited to the scope of our research and consultations and has not yet been substantially tested in the field. Practitioners will undoubtedly need to adjust their use of this paper to the unique needs of specific interventions, and to existing M&E systems and management standards. Furthermore, analysis of adaptation strategies and efforts beyond the intervention level are largely beyond the scope of this paper. Very different methodologies may be needed to assess, for example, large-scale, countrywide adaptation strategies, or sector-wide adaptation efforts. Finally, as practitioners, governments, and other development cooperation partners progress in this emerging field, much remains to be tested and learned about “what works” in adaptation and how to measure it.

Stern 2006. ↩
UNDP 2008a. ↩

Adapting for a Green Economy: Companies, Communities and Climate Change

Maggie Barron — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:54:43 -0400

A Caring for Climate report by the United Nations Global Compact, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Oxfam, and World Resources Institute (WRI)

Executive Summary

Drawing on the results of a 2010 survey of corporate signatories to the United Nations Global Compact and the United Nations Environment Programme Caring for Climate initiative, as well as on existing literature, this report makes the business case for private sector adaptation to climate change in ways that build the resilience of vulnerable communities in developing countries. It then offers actions that companies and policymakers can pursue to catalyze and scale up private sector action on adaptation. It is ultimately the responsibility of the public sector to meet the critical climate change adaptation needs of the poor and vulnerable; thus private sector engagement cannot substitute for critically needed public investment and policies. However, private sector investment can serve as a pivotal part of a comprehensive governmentled approach to addressing climate impacts.

This report is a resource for companies with a national, regional or global reach that are interested in increasing their strategic focus on adaptation in developing countries where they have operations, supply chains, employees and current or potential customers.

While many companies are focused on climate change mitigation — slowing the rate of climate change through reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and other strategies — most have yet to develop strategies for dealing with the immediate to long-term consequences of climate change. This report is also aimed at national and international policymakers involved in climate change and sustainable development dialogues and decision-making, including those who will participate in the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 (Rio+20). It is hoped that the report’s findings will be useful for a much wider range of actors as well, including small, local businesses in developing countries that are on the front line of climate impacts; civil society organizations seeking to strengthen their work around climate change and sustainable development; and subnational policymakers, who are in a key position to shape a productive interface among government, communities and businesses.

Private Sector Adaptation, Sustainable Development and the Green Economy

The challenges that communities in developing countries face as a result of climate change — such as more frequent and intense storms, water scarcity, declining agricultural productivity and poor health — also pose serious challenges for businesses. Community risks are business risks. Both local and global companies depend on community members as suppliers, customers and employees. They also depend on local resources, services and infrastructure to be able to operate. It is difficult to separate community well-being from companies’ viability and, in turn, overall economic growth.

Businesses that make these connections and adapt to climate change with community needs in mind can gain a competitive edge. Businesses that respond to climate change in ways that undermine communities’ efforts to adapt may face reputational and brand risks, and they may even lose their ability to operate in certain locations. Through responsible, strategic approaches to addressing climate change risks and opportunities, in consultation with people in affected communities, companies can:

Avoid costs, manage liabilities and build resilience to climate change impacts by addressing climate risks throughout their operations and value chains, while at the same time increasing community resilience.
Expand market share and create wealth in communities by developing and deploying new products and services that help people adapt.
Access new opportunities to collaborate with the public sector, as developing country governments seek corporate partners who can effectively deliver goods and services that support high-priority climate change adaptation efforts.
Build corporate reputation and exercise good corporate citizenship by showing commitment to decreasing climate vulnerability and promoting long-term resilience in places where it is needed most.

Investment or other private sector actions taken to adapt to climate change can also have the benefit of promoting a transition to a “green economy”, which has been identified by governments as one of the anchoring themes of Rio+20. In its simplest expression, a green economy is one that is low-carbon, resource-efficient and socially inclusive. In a green economy, growth in income and employment can be generated by strategic public and private investments in developed and developing countries that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improve resource efficiency and prevent the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services (that is, the benefits of nature to people). Businesses can accelerate the transition to a green economy by taking advantage of the natural synergies that exist between green economy initiatives and climate change adaptation opportunities. When businesses work with communities to restore mangrove forests as natural barriers against storms, or develop affordable drip irrigation equipment that can be used by small-scale farmers facing water scarcity, they are also greening the economy.

Business Perspectives and Action on Adaptation

The Caring for Climate survey revealed that 83 percent of 72 responding companies believe that climate change impacts pose a risk to their products or services. A slightly higher percentage of companies (86 percent) think that responding to climate change risks, or investing in adaptation solutions, poses a business opportunity for their company. Many Caring for Climate companies surveyed have employees and operations in developing countries, which are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change and have limited resources with which to adapt. Not only are companies that operate in, have markets in or source in developing countries exposed to risk, but they can also play a critical role in building climate resilience in these countries.

However, beyond planning for the most obvious or immediate threats — increasingly unreliable access to key inputs like water and energy, for example, or damage to assets from flooding — most companies are not yet taking concrete steps to address climate change risks and to respond to new opportunities in a comprehensive, integrated way.

There is not yet widespread understanding among Caring for Climate signatories of what climate adaptation is and what it means for them or for the markets they serve. Uncertainties about the location, magnitude, potential timing and consequences of climate change impacts make it risky for them to tackle adaptation on their own, and few good tools exist to help businesses assess climate risks and opportunities. The survey revealed that companies find it difficult to incorporate scientific climate change data, which typically cover a large geographic area and span a long-term time frame, into practical business decision-making, which tends to be shorterterm in nature and location-specific. Information about the full range of adaptation costs and benefits is often not available as an input to companies’ investment analyses. Companies may see few economic and policy incentives to make significant up-front investments that bolster long-term climate resilience, for the company and for communities that will be most affected by climate change impacts.

These factors can make it difficult for businesses to make adaptation a strategic priority. Even if key internal stakeholders have prioritized adaptation, it can be hard for them to find the capacity to consult and communicate with a wide range of key external stakeholders, including suppliers and customers. Few Caring for Climate signatories are engaging with suppliers around the issue of climate risk, and few are exploring how their customers’ needs may change as a result of climate change impacts, and what the corresponding business implications — and possible missed opportunities — may be of shifting demands and preferences. Companies also reported challenges in analyzing the connection between their own adaptation needs and community needs; only half of the companies that responded to the Caring for Climate survey said that they have recognized the possible social consequences (positive or negative) of their adaptation strategies. In the end, very few Caring for Climate signatories have been able to design comprehensive adaptation goals with corresponding business indicators to track economic performance and progress towards those goals.

Although business adaptation to climate change is clearly at a nascent stage, approximately one-third of companies surveyed reported having a strong emphasis on addressing climate risks, and about the same percentage reported a strong emphasis on responding to adaptation opportunities.

The survey revealed some emerging best practices in how companies are responding to complex climate change challenges and opportunities while contributing to sustainable development. This report provides several case studies that not only serve as models for other companies, but also provide evidence that private sector adaptation at the nexus of company needs and the needs of vulnerable communities in developing countries makes good business sense.

Strategic private sector adaptation to climate change must be a purposeful process: It will not happen by chance. Companies must prioritize adaptation and take action to address risks and pursue opportunities. Governments can assist companies to overcome barriers to investment and harness the resources and innovation of the private sector to contribute to the public good.

Practical Measures for Companies

Companies will find that addressing the impacts of climate change necessitates a departure from business as usual; traditional approaches are insufficient. Adaptation champions within the company will want to focus their colleagues’ attention on three key questions: 1) What does climate resilience mean for the company? 2) What will position the company to navigate risks and lead markets in a warming world? and 3) How will the company engage partners to minimize risks and seize opportunities? Effective, comprehensive responses to these questions will require companies to…

Connect climate “adaptation” and “resilience” to the company and corporate culture, building on existing mitigation initiatives.
Integrate climate adaptation into core strategic business planning processes.
Align business objectives with adaptation priorities.
Build a portfolio of climate-resilient goods and services.
Build mutually beneficial strategies with stakeholders; build communication channels.
Partner with internal and external decision-makers.

Practical Measures for Policymakers

Governments have a central role to play in catalyzing private sector provision of goods and services that support climate change adaptation and in encouraging climate-resilient business practices. Some public sector efforts to incentivize business contributions to adaptation must be developed and implemented through agreements at the international level. Policy focus at the national and local level, however, is essential, because adaptation challenges and solutions are specific to each locality, and business barriers and opportunities will be countryspecific. To create a facilitating environment for private sector investment in climate change adaptation, policymakers can…

Demonstrate policy and finance commitment to adaptation.
Engage businesses as stakeholders in planning and implementation.
Stimulate the market for adaptation through financial and risk-reduction incentives.
Develop policy and regulatory frameworks to guide corporate practices.
Provide businesses with the information and tools they need to make investments that support climate resilience in vulnerable communities.
Consider new forms of public-private partnerships to tackle the most complex challenges to sustainable development and climate resilience.

Conclusion

Addressing the adaptation needs of vulnerable communities at the scale that is necessary will require unprecedented levels of cooperation, collaboration and resource mobilization among governments, businesses, civil society groups and communities themselves. The private sector has much to contribute to the development and implementation of climate change adaptation solutions, including sectorspecific expertise, technology, significant levels of financing, efficiency and an entrepreneurial spirit. The key is to find the nexus of shared interest where business incentives align with communities’ adaptation needs. Companies that rigorously assess climate change risks and opportunities and implement creative solutions that build long-term resilience will create business value while making important contributions to sustainable development and equitable green growth.

Adaptation Planning Under a Copenhagen Agreement: Laying a Foundation for Projects, Policies, and Capacities that Countries Need

Tim Herzog — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:40:24 -0500

Enabling Adaptation: Priorities for Supporting the Rural Poor in a Changing Climate

Payson Schwin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:15:38 -0400

Effective climate adaptation requires an enabling environment—one that grants the poor the rights, resources and access they need to sustain and benefit from ecosystems, governments and markets. Development experience provides important lessons for fostering such enabling environments, including principles of good governance that provide the rural poor with control of the ecosystems on which they depend.

Enabling Climate Adaptation
Watch on YouTube

The livelihoods of the rural poor are rooted in the productivity of ecosystems. Climate change, however, is already altering the functioning of these ecosystems in profound—and often negative—ways. Over 2 billion rural inhabitants live on less than $2 per day. Helping these people to build their assets and incomes will bolster their resilience and adaptive capacity, enabling them to meet the challenges of climate change and ecosystem degradation without sinking deeper into poverty. But how?

Effective climate adaptation requires an enabling environment—one that grants the poor the rights, resources and access they need to sustain and benefit from ecosystems, governments and markets. It begins with fair and equitable governance. Sound ecosystem management—whether at the watershed level, on a shared plot of forest land, or of a particular water body—can reduce the poor’s vulnerability to climate-related risks by creating economic opportunities that build livelihoods and increase resilience. Unfortunately, decades of development experience have shown that governance failures often rob the poor of effective control of the ecosystems on which they depend.

Key Investments to Enable Adaptation

Supporting pro-poor climate adaptation begins by giving primacy to enabling activities that grant the poor the rights, resources and access they need to sustain and benefi t from their ecosystem assets.

Priority areas for investment include:

A. Strengthen an enabling environment at the national level.

Promoting tenure reform for improved resource access and livelihood security.
Providing market access through regulatory reform to benefit small producers.
Decentralizing authority over natural resources to local levels.
Providing access to information.

B. Strengthen local institutions and good governance practices on the ground.

Promoting representative and fair natural resource management and use institutions at the local level.
Facilitating community participation, especially of vulnerable groups, in natural resource management.
Fostering local support organizations.
Communicating success stories.

C. Establish good governance metrics for adaptation.

Source: Adapted from World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience.

Just as governance successes, such as Bangladesh’s cyclone management system or Guatemala’s community forestry program, can reduce vulnerabilities, governance failures stand as obstacles to climate adaptation, depriving the poor of the means and powers to benefit from improved management of natural resources (Batha 2008). Indeed, lack of resource rights and insufficient access to markets, finance, information, and technology are often greater determinants of vulnerability for the poor than climate change itself (Schipper 2007, Ribot 2009). As national and international policymakers turn their attention to climate change adaptation, they should keep in mind that constructing an enabling environment that minimizes these vulnerabilities will be central to any meaningful and lasting increase in the adaptive capacity of the rural poor.

Interest in climate change adaptation is mounting quickly among national governments and the international community as a comprehensive new international climate deal through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), grows likely. However, most current adaptation efforts remain tentative and incremental, in part because the international community has yet to forge a commonly accepted model of what successful adaptation should look like, including clear goals and targets (Hedger et al. 2008:10, 14-15).

This brief seeks to help fill this gap. It is formulated in response to an increasingly urgent need for articulating and agreeing upon a vision of effective adaptation—in part to inform the architecture for financing climate adaptation. The paper argues that the poor, and in particular the resource-dependent rural poor, must be a central concern in any effective adaptation funding effort, and that one of the major pillars of an effective adaptation strategy is support for an enabling environment that allows them to build their resilience through natural resource management.

The first section proposes that good governance and fair, representative institutions are crucial to help the rural poor adapt effectively to climate change. The second half of the brief proposes specific governance investments that adaptation funding should support.

Paying the Premium: Insurance as a Risk Management Tool for Climate Change

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Bellagio Framework for Adaptation Assessment and Prioritization

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

As climate negotiators, international funders, and national governments all begin to develop climate adaptation agendas, it is getting more urgent to have a shared approach to identifying priorities for action. A shared approach could help catalyze coordinated action among diverse funders, and could provide a common basis for assessing progress in different places. However, finding a systematic way of identifying priorities at the international level is hard because of the huge array of potential climate impacts, the different types of societies they will hit, and the wide range of potential adaptation strategies and measures.

The Bellagio Framewrok Approach: Identifying National Adaptation Functions

One approach to this challenge is to identify a set of fundamental functions that all countries must perform if they are to respond effectively to climate change. For example, these functions might include things like managing information needed for adaptation decisions, involving stakeholders in adaptation planning, creating incentives for the private sector to adapt, or integrating climate change into disaster risk reduction. Countries will all perform these functions differently, depending on their national circumstances, but the core of the function is the same. The capacities needed to perform key adaptation functions can be thought of as elements of a national “adaptation system” that will support society in the long-term, iterative process of adjusting as the climate changes. Unfortunately, few countries are fully equipped with the information systems, policy structures, and basic institutions that provide such capabilities. Moreover, to date there have been few systematic efforts even to enumerate key national adaptation functions or the activities and capabilities needed to perform them.

Why Do Adaptation Functions Matter?

Failure (thus far) to identify and clearly articulate a core set of national functions has contributed to widespread confusion about the overlap between adaptation and development. This confusion has made it more difficult to build the political will needed to generate truly additional adaptation funding, both within the UNFCCC and in funding decisions elsewhere. Perhaps more important, the lack of a concise, user-friendly articulation of key adaptation functions increases the difficulty of building robust, far-sighted national approaches to adaptation. Decision-makers are lacking:

a framework with which to identify strengths and gaps in adaptation capacities in a given country, in order to prioritize actions and investments, and
a reference against which to assess progress on adaptation, in order to adjust course if necessary.

A First Step: The Bellagio Framework Workshop

In November 2008, the World Resources Institute (WRI) hosted a small technical workshop to begin developing a broadly applicable framework of national adaptation functions. The workshop was held in Bellagio, Italy, with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The objective of the workshop was two-fold:

to identify a core set of major adaptation functions needed in a broad spectrum of countries, and
to explore options for building progress metrics to assess effectiveness in performing the functions. Criteria for the functions framework included:
Broad applicability
Flexibility to accommodate national circumstances
Logic and straightforwardness
User-friendliness and common sense
A top-down approach that empowers bottom-up action
Comprehensiveness with regard to key national adaptation functions
Compatibility with other tools, frameworks, and decision criteria

The table in the working paper (PDF, 108 Kb) lists the key adaptation functions identified by the workshop participants, which are now under further development by workshop participants and their partners.

Next Steps

Clearly, different stakeholders (e.g., planners, negotiators, funders, project implementers, NGOs, evaluators) who may use the framework will focus on different adaptation functions and will approach them from different perspectives. Moreover, countries will each build the capacities needed to perform the functions at different rates and in different sequences. To address these considerations, WRI is now exploring possible development of different assessment and planning tools, based on the functions in the framework. Options for further development include:

Function-by-function guidance to assist policy-makers and planners, including links to existing tools and relevant information sources
Development of assessment questions for each function, for use in establishing monitoring and evaluation programs
Institutional analysis to better link each function with the types of stakeholders or agencies likely to be responsible for it
“Sector-based” tools that translate the generic framework into functions specifi c to health, agriculture, water, and other issue areas

A key next step is to test the framework—or part of it—through a practical pilot assessment in a developing country.

Making Climate Your Business: Private Sector Adaptation in Southeast Asia

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Climate change is here. The present and future implications of a warming climate are becoming clearer, thanks to a growing body of scientific evidence devoted to the topic. Most of society now recognizes the importance of dealing with the problem, which will include not just warmer temperatures in many regions and sea level rise, but also changes in weather patterns that produce more intense and frequent tropical storms, flooding, and drought. While much of the climate change debate has historically centered around how to prevent additional warming, efforts at halting climate change are no longer sufficient. We have passed the point of preventing all climate change effects: adaptation to inevitable impacts–including more natural disasters–is now equally critical to minimize the harm that these impacts cause across society.

Businesses need to adapt. Many businesses have no choice about whether to respond to climate change impacts: climate change will force itself upon them. Their choices now come down to:

When to respond. Should they act in anticipation of climate impacts or wait until they have no choice but to act?
How to respond. Should they upgrade their facilities? Change the standards for the businesses they finance? Alter their product line? Enter new markets? Do nothing?

What any given business chooses to do will depend upon the type of business, its place in a larger economic, political, and social context, and the unique ways that climate change affects its work. Climate change may affect a business through a number of possible pathways. It could, for example, affect:

Supply chains
Employees
Customers
Distribution networks
Finance options
Insurance costs, and
The macroeconomic environment

Companies in Southeast Asia are at particular risk. This region is likely to experience a combination of more frequent and severe floods, droughts, and cyclones. With its extensive coastlines, Southeast Asia is also significantly exposed to sea level rise. Though many of these countries and their businesses are accustomed to dealing with a challenging climate, climate change will present new difficulties, especially when added to ongoing environmental degradation, widespread poverty, and, in some cases, political and economic instability. Businesses with interests in the region will likely experience repercussions of climate change through at least one of the pathways listed above.

Business actions have consequences for the vulnerable populations in this region. Southeast Asia is home to some of the populations most vulnerable to climate change in the world. In many of these countries large portions of the population live in poverty, and are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as they lack the resources necessary for many types of adaptive actions. Moreover, ongoing social and environmental challenges in the region – notably growing income inequality, rising food prices, and widespread deforestation – contribute to social vulnerability and make climate change more likely to bring significant harms. Businesses may not typically focus much attention on assuring that the poorest populations around them can adapt to climate change. However, the private sector will play a substantial role in determining the level of adaptation success achieved across Southeast Asia. This report will emphasize possible “win-win” opportunities in this context – e.g. providing goods and services needed to aid adaptation across society, or contracting with government to deliver expertise or services that help broader segments of the population adapt – where business incentives may align with the needs of the poor, vulnerable populations of the region. The paper will also note where business actions might undermine adaptation among the poor.

Business is behind. While governments and non-profits in the region are busy tackling climate change with the help of funding from abroad, the business sector is notably behind. Now is a particularly opportune moment for the private sector in the region to catch up: doing so will allow business to keep a competitive edge by accounting for emerging climate risks and opportunities. Quick action will also help these businesses to team up with government and civil society to promote adaptation among the most vulnerable segments of the population – and make a profit while doing so.