WRI Publications Feed: Vulnerability and Adaptation

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
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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, 6 pages, 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.

Financing Adaptation: Opportunities for Innovation and Experimentation

Tim Herzog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:43:38 -0500

Climate change is upon us. The earth is warming, seasons are shifting, species are migrating, and water is fl owing in new patterns. The accelerating and deepening impacts of climate change will touch everyone on earth, but those who stand to suffer most are the poor. People and governments must find the will and the means to slow, stop, and reverse the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to avert catastrophic warming.

But it is already too late to avert some serious consequences. We must also learn to adapt to a warmer world. This question of adaptation is a particularly pressing issue for national and international agencies tasked with providing financial and technical assistance to reduce poverty in developing countries. As leaders begin to consider policies and measures to respond to mounting climate effects, it is critical that adaptation efforts be designed to support the poorest communities in their development efforts. Likewise, development assistance must foster adaptation if it is to succeed within a changing climate. That the poor are the people least responsible for global warming makes these efforts all the more imperative.

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges involved in financing adaptation efforts in developing countries. The last two years have seen a surge of interest in adaptation finance with new funding proposals floated on an almost weekly basis. But many critical questions remain. How much will adaptation cost? Which proposals are most likely to generate an adequate and predictable flow of funds? How should these funds be channeled so that they reach those most in need? How do we ensure adaptation funds are used most effectively?

This paper seeks to provide some answers, and to lay out the state of play in the fledgling field of climate adaptation finance. Section I provides a conceptual model for the relationship between adaptation and development. Section II reviews estimates of adaptation costs and the funding chasm with existing sources of adaptation finance. Section III assesses existing and emerging approaches to generating new finance from public sources. With an eye to the United Nations climate negotiations for a post 2012 international climate agreement, it also sets out guiding principles for generating funds on a scale commensurate with the challenge. Section IV looks at options for channeling adaptation funds to developing countries, and ensuring the accountability of chosen institutions. Section V highlights emerging approaches to spending adaptation funds and dissects the relative merits for the world’s poor of financing specific adaptation projects or mainstreaming adaptation into development.

In Section VI, Next Steps, we use a U.S. legislative case study to explore how de-linking the three phases of adaptation finance—generation, channeling and spending—could promote innovation and political support for such initiatives around the world.

Throughout, we propose guiding principles to assure effective decision-making by the international community in tackling this most urgent of challenges of our time.

Weathering the Storm: Options for Framing Adaptation and Development

Heather McGray — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:53:04 -0500

Confusion about the relationship between adaptation and development has meant that funding mechanisms may create redundancies or leave gaps in the landscape of critical adaptation and development activities.

Drawing on Internet resources, Weathering the Storm clarifies this relationship by analyzing 135 projects, policies, and other initiatives from the developing world that have been labeled by implementers or researchers as “adaptation to climate change.”

The report analyzes the objectives of initiatives and the strategies utilized in implementation to characterize some of the ways that adaptation and development overlap. A continuum of activities from “pure” development to “pure” climate change is proposed as a conceptual framework to understand when different “development” activities may play an “adaptation” function. Recommendations address governance challenges, funding implications, and next steps in analysis and policy development.