WRI Stories Feed: Vulnerability and Adaptation

Floods are Reminder of What’s at Stake at the Durban Climate Talks

Heather McGray — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:40:11 -0500

This piece was written with Polly Ghazi, Writer/Editor for the World Resources Report.

Delegates from around the world attending the UN climate conference in South Africa got two unfortunate, but…

Adaptation in COP17 Durban: Opportunities for Clarity and Consolidation

Heather McGray — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:11:07 -0500

The Cancun Adaptation Framework agreed during COP16 provides potential for a new action orientation to adaptation under the UNFCCC. COP17 in Durban presents a big opportunity to resolve several critical pieces of the Cancun Adaptation Framework,…

Making Adaptation Count

Heather McGray — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:58:16 -0400

WRI’s new report, Making Adaptation Count, proposes a framework for monitoring and evaluating adaptation. What does this mean?

Countries…

Q & A on the Release of Climate Science 2009-2010

Kelly Levin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:33:03 -0400

Today, WRI releases Climate Science 2009-2010, the latest installment in our periodic review of the state of play of the science of climate change. Co-authors Kelly…

Learning Lessons from Wildfires, from Texas to Brazil

Kelly Levin — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:03:45 -0400

This post was written with James Anderson, Communications Coordinator at the World Resources Institute.

“This is unprecedented fire…

Famine in the Horn of Africa

Heather McGray — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:29:45 -0400

As the climate changes, the global community and national governments both need to take action to prevent the kind of humanitarian disaster underway In parts of the Horn of Africa. Early action can help communities confront climate change,…

Report from Bangladesh: Turning Local Adaptation Lessons into National Policy

Heather McGray — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:29:13 -0400

How can national policies support communities to adapt to climate change?

Across the globe, citizens are working together to safeguard their communities from troubling trends associated with climate change. On the islands of Papua New Guinea, coastal villagers have planted mangroves to stabilize eroding beaches. Along the rivers of Bangladesh, farmers cultivate floating gardens that can withstand the region’s frequent floods. In the semi-arid zones of Rajasthan in India, farmers keep track of the changes in their local weather, and work together to decide how best to manage the shifting risks to their crops. These locally driven innovations – and many, many more – are part of an emerging movement known as “community-based adaptation.”

Recently in Dhaka, Bangladesh, WRI – together with over thirty other organizations – co-sponsored the Fifth International Conference on Community-based Adaptation. Nearly three hundred people attended from around the world, bringing with them stories, strategies, and challenges to inform the theme of the conference: how can we “scale up” community-based adaptation efforts?

WRI hosted a panel session on a central question for scaling up local initiatives: how can national policies best support community-based adaptation efforts? While local people must play the leading role in community-based adaptation, national level law, policy, investment and institutional arrangements can play an important facilitating or enabling role.

For example, national policies can create incentives for communities to undertake adaptation, or they may provide resources for community use in adaptation initiatives. National government programs may gather ideas from community-led pilot projects and replicate them through larger initiatives. On the other hand, outdated or maladaptive national initiatives can stifle adaptation or lead to perverse outcomes.

Over 100 people attended WRI’s panel to hear stories and recommendations from five speakers. Two panelists provided government perspectives. Mrs. Nahau Rooney, Climate Change Chair of the Manus Provincial Government in Papua New Guinea (PNG) described “PNG Vision 2050,” the nation’s over-arching development strategy, which includes adaptation to climate change as one of its seven “pillars.” Under this pillar, provinces like Manus have developed provincial adaptation strategies that include community projects like the mangrove planting mentioned above.

Mr. Legesse Gebremeskel, of Ethiopia’s Federal Environmental Protection Authority, shared a similar story: as part of its national adaptation planning process, Ethiopia piloted a participatory regional planning process in the Afar region that included local-level planning for adaptation to climate change. Lessons from Afar have provided a model for other regions within the country.

From Plan International, panelist Dr. Nick Hall presented on the importance of children’s participation in adaptation initiatives. Children face unique threats from climate change; studies have shown that they bear 88 percent of the disease burden of climate change. They also can play important roles as agents of change, sometimes taking the lead, ahead of their parents, in actions to reduce disaster risk. Dr. Hall called on climate change policymakers to scale up community-based adaptation by investing in education and by utilizing school systems as a channel for adaptation action.

Mr. Jeremiah Mushosho from ZERO Regional Environmental Organization described a set of linked research, advocacy and training activities that his organization has led in Zimbabwe. He stressed the importance of civil society as an agent for bringing adaptation ideas and lessons from the community level up to national decision-makers and to the public at large. He emphasized ZERO’s experience working through NGO networks and through training initiatives for members of the media.

The final panelist, Dr. Arivudai Nambi, shared lessons from the capacity-building work of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), which helped establish community-based weather centers in Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh states in India. Farmers have used the weather data gathered to develop “rules of thumb” for when to plant, irrigate, and apply fertilizer, based on local climatic conditions. They are well-placed to adjust these rules as the climate changes, based on their own direct engagement in the local weather centers and in management of the information the centers produce.

Moreover, MSSRF’s advocacy work at the national level has led India’s Ministry of Agriculture to agree, in principle, to support the development of similar local weather centers in villages across the country. MSSRF has also hosted national policy dialogues to share their findings with ministry officials, and have worked actively on the development of official state adaptation action plans.

During the Q&A phase of the WRI panel, much discussion focused on the advocacy process, including methods and strategies for getting lessons on adaptation from the community level to influence national policy. Panelists highlighted the importance of the media in this process, as well as the need for advocacy to be built into a community-based project from the very start. Several panelists suggested taking the view that community-based adaptation is always an experiment, with the aim of drawing lessons that provide a basis for advocacy, which should lead to scaling up through the policy context.

When asked what one action national governments should prioritize in order to scale up community-based adaptation, panelists gave a diverse set of recommendations, including:

Nick Hall: Listen to children.
Jeremiah Mushosho: Enact a national adaptation policy.
Arivudai Nambi: Implement extension programs that spread community lessons on adaptation.
Legasse Gebremeskel: Build awareness and commitment on climate change among national officials.
Nahau Rooney: Include province and local adaptation activities in national budgets.

The panel session ended with many audience hands in the air and many remaining issues to discuss. To further explore the many issues raised, WRI will follow up on the panel by working with others from the conference to develop a book chapter addressing national action to support community-based adaptation.

Heather McGray is Senior Associate for Vulnerability and Adaptation in WRI’s Climate and Energy Program, and served as facilitator for the session in Dhaka. Together with Research Analyst Aarjan Dixit, whose also blogged from Bangladesh, she designed the session and recruited speakers. Funding from the Dutch and Swedish governments enabled WRI to serve as a co-sponsor of the CBA5 Conference and to support attendance by several developing country participants.

Adapting to Climate Change In Bangladesh

Aarjan Dixit — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:04:41 -0400

Floating gardens, raised homes, and reflections from the field.

WRI’s Aarjan Dixit recently attended the 5th Annual Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change Conference in Bangladesh. As part of the conference, participants visited local communities to see how adaptation projects were working.

A road led from the river toward the entrance of Goalbari, a mainly Hindu village surrounded by lush green agriculture fields in the Gopalgunj district of central Bangladesh. To get to Goalbari, we had taken a short boat ride across the canal of the Madhumati River, dug by the British about 100 years ago to transport jute (a vegetable fiber used for fabric) from the area to the port city of Kolkata. A gang of children, on holiday celebrating the country’s 40th Independence Day, watched as we made our way to the village. The mostly low-lying landscape was dotted with raised areas of inhabited land connected by roads built on embankments.

When the annual monsoon rains come here, the river floods and submerges most the area. Floods have always been a source of renewal in this part of the world, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil and helping increase agricultural productivity. However, several past development activities (especially the construction of embankments), and now climate change, have created new and significant challenges to the people living in the area.

The village of Goalbari. Photo: Aarjan Dixit

Villagers told us that the frequency and intensity of the floods have increased over the years. And perhaps more importantly, when the floods come, the flood water stays for months. With natural drainage channels blocked by earth embankments, this effectively means that the area is water-logged for almost half of the year, disrupting agriculture, mobility, and making basic services like drinking water and healthcare very hard to access.

Yet, the first people who welcomed us into the village were a group of women that had formed a successful cooperative to address the challenges the floods have brought. Their model is dispersing loans to other women in the village from their collective savings and charging interest on them. Loans in turn are used to buy livestock and other assets that could improve income over the longer term.

Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies (BCAS) and the Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB), two organizations active in the area, use this women’s collective to begin helping villages respond to the challenges associated with floods. With financial support from Norwegian Church Aid, these two organizations had identified 17 of the village’s poorest households and decided to raise the foundational platform, or plinth, of their houses by four feet to protect them from the flood waters. A few other households, after seeing the benefits of such raised plinths, in turn made their own investments to raise the plinths of their houses.

Floating beds known as baira allow villagers to continue growing vegetables when flood waters are high. Photo: Aarjan Dixit

With their agricultural lands inundated for months, many households in the area also use a floating bed of compacted water hyacinths to grow vegetables, locally known as baira. These floating gardens fall and rise with the water level and can allow households to grow vegetables for consumption when the flood waters are high. Researchers from BCAS have devised ways to improve the design of such bairas to make them lighter and stay afloat for longer periods of time.

The significant challenges that the people of the area face became clearer when we visited Dasarathbala, a villager in Goalbari. His family’s house plinth had been raised and they had a floating garden. However, he and his family are agriculture laborers, without money to rent land. Recently the family had to sell their boat – indispensible when the area is flooded – in order to raise money. The men with Dasarathbala told us that the children could not go to school during the floods and that the lack of electricity made their lives difficult. The women told us of other worries: they lacked private space for personal sanitation when land was flooded; providing food for the children and caring for pregnant women became really difficult; the floods made travel from home nearly impossible; and of course, when the area was under water, there was no agriculture and their livelihood suffered.

Raising the plinths of the houses and developing floating beds were helping the poorest households of the community to cope with some of the challenges associated with higher and more intense levels of flooding and water logging. But these kinds of technical interventions can only go so far in helping poor families address the serious climatic challenges they face.

It was clear from our visit to Goalbari that diversifying the ways people could make a living when the area is under water was fundamental to their long-term adaptation. Developing ways for students to go to school and to keep schools open even during floods seemed equally important. Improving access to services for these communities, like drinking water, health facilities and other types of income generating activities were critical to improving people’s resilience to these weather related challenges.

Many of the activities people say would help them adapt to weather challenges are often the same development-focused activities that would help increase resilience to a host of other economic and natural shocks. The lack of land for Dasarathbala’s family, for example, makes them poor and vulnerable with or without the worsening climate change impacts.

Secure tenure rights, and access and ownership over resources are often fundamental to improving resilience to weather extremes and vulnerabilities over the long term. As the global community struggles to tease out the nuances that separate adaptation from general development strategy, practitioners will need to be careful that the more immediate short-term needs of the poor and vulnerable are met while attempting to plan for the longer-term impacts of climate change.

Climate change and other weather related events do, however, present unique challenges that will require us to think in innovative ways. Often project and community-driven approaches like the interventions I mention above are critical to understanding local needs, keeping communities central to decision and planning processes. Yet, they alone are not able to address the greater landscape of environmental services that might be needed to contend with such challenges. For example, drainage issues, often one of the major causes of water logging in delta regions like Gopalgunj, can’t be solved by a narrow focus on communities and may need us to look at regional scales and subnational, national or sometimes even international processes. Similarly, local community-based approaches will also need to address other system-wide activities like access to markets, seasonal migration as an income diversifying source, and trade that could be important resilience-building activities for people like Dasarathbala and his family in Goalbari.

Towards a Climate Safe Common Future

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:07:53 -0500

The two defining challenges of this century are climate change and poverty. Our challenge is to find a way to deal with both, at the same time.

This piece originally appeared on the World Resources Report website.

The most important challenge for today’s political leaders is to safeguard the human environment so that our species can survive on this planet. I think the following three points are particularly relevant for any leader wanting to strike a balance between the pressing needs of today and the decisions necessary to secure our long term survival.

1. Base your policies on sound scientific knowledge

In my professional and political life, I have always wanted to build on the principle learned first from my father, who had a profound influence on me. He was a medical doctor who imprinted on me the importance of having a scientific and rational basis for opinions and actions. As I became a medical doctor myself, my resolve to base my opinions and actions on the best available evidence grew even stronger. So, first of all, we need to build evidence, and strengthen the knowledge base on which we depend when making decisions.

It is so important to couple state of the art scientific knowledge with strong political commitment. Science must be translated into political action to be of relevance to society.

At the same time, we must never overlook how important it is to couple state of the art scientific knowledge with strong political commitment. Science must be translated into political action to be of relevance to society. This is true for gender equality, health policies, environmental policies and climate policy. Ideology and values play an important role when we set our goals. But when it comes to deciding on what we should do to reach them, they have to be inspired by sound scientific knowledge. And we must never forget that it is always cheaper to prevent than to cure, whether we focus on people or societies. Therefore, mitigation remains the best adaptation policy.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established 22 years ago, has provided increasingly robust scientific information on the causes, the impacts and the solutions related to climate change. They point out that the warming of the globe may reach 5-6 degrees by the end of this century if no action is taken. This would be devastating and totally unsustainable. According to the IPCC we must reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases to a fraction of what they are today by 2050 to succeed in staying below 2 degrees temperature rise.

In a fair and sustainable world, greenhouse gas emissions in all countries will tend to converge towards the same level, per capita, in the long run. This should be recognised by all country leaders, and they should start working towards it. This would show the spirit of responsibility so clearly needed in order to ensure a climate safe, common future.

2. Seek global cooperation

Visit the World Resources Report website for more information on decision-making in a changing climate.

The challenge of climate change is not a question that can be left to the Minister of the Environment to deal with. As the most important issue facing any country, it has to be dealt with at the highest levels of government. And international cooperation is needed in order to achieve results.

Emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) contribute to climate change. The effects are not primarily local, as with other forms of pollution, but are felt globally. Emissions in Australia on the other side of the globe are just as detrimental to climate in Norway as are local emissions in Scandinavia. No issue better demonstrates the need for global cooperation than climate change.

In order to deal with the challenge of climate change, a climate agreement will need to include most countries of the world, cover all major sources of emissions of GHG, and include concrete and long term climate goals in line with the recommendations of the IPCC.

It may be challenging to translate scientific results into practical policies on the domestic scene. It is even more challenging to reach an evidence-based agreement among nearly 200 countries. Especially when the measures to be taken come with a price tag and the distribution of initial costs has to be decided upon to reach an agreement. Distributing costs is difficult, even if we know they will continue to spiral if we do not agree. But this is precisely what we must do.

3. National and global redistribution is needed

This is a classic case of market failure. There is no price, no cost involved for the individual emitter, even though emissions result in the entire human race paying the ultimate price.

Why do human beings destroy their planet by emitting unsustainable levels of GHGs? The reason is that this is a classic case of market failure. There is no price, no cost involved for the individual emitter, even though emissions result in the entire human race paying the ultimate price. What we need to do is to make pollution bad business. The key is to put a price on emissions. We need to secure cooperation between developed and developing countries on public regulation to correct this market failure.

What will have to happen first is that developed countries must demonstrate in concrete terms that low-carbon growth is possible. If the rich countries, who have filled up the atmosphere with CO2, and who are in possession of more resources than the developing countries, do not switch to a low-carbon economy, they cannot ask developing countries to do so either.

Once developed countries have demonstrated that low-carbon growth is technically feasible and economically viable, they must do what it takes to make low carbon growth the cheapest and preferred path to development for developing countries.

In the face of starvation and misery, growth and development tend to take precedence over almost all other considerations. Only when low carbon growth also comes across as the low cost way to development, can we expect poor countries to make sustainable and green choices.

The two defining challenges of this century are climate change and poverty. Our challenge is to find a way to deal with both, at the same time. We need to see rapid and broad based economic development happening alongside substantial reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.

The financial crisis has started even former free market champions thinking about the merits of redistribution, both within countries and between countries. They realise that it is not a good idea after all to have a system where one small group gets very rich, and willing to take ever more risks, by lending more and more to the larger group which gets poorer and poorer.

We live in times when it is particularly important to avoid bad investment decisions. My best advice is: whatever you do, make sure it contributes to the sustainable, low-carbon economy we will need in order to survive and thrive on planet earth in the future. Otherwise you will be wasting your money.

Gro Harlem Brundtland is a Special Envoy on Climate Change for the UN Secretary-General and former prime minister of Norway.

Climate Adaptation: Can Developing Countries Prepare for a Hotter Tomorrow?

Manish Bapna — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:41:04 -0500

As well as urgently cutting emissions, nations everywhere need to take steps to adapt to a very different world.

Over the past year, the world has witnessed weather events on four continents so extreme that they stretch the limits of modern human experience.

Last summer’s flooding in Pakistan inundated one fifth of the country and affected 20 million people. The record Moscow heat wave led to more than 10,000 deaths, widespread peat bog and forest fires, and the loss of a third of Russia’s grain crop, driving up food prices worldwide. 2011 has already witnessed flooding in Eastern Australia that submerged an area the size of France and Germany combined, followed by the most powerful cyclone to hit the country in almost a century. In Brazil, New Year floods combined with mudslides triggered the nation’s deadliest natural disaster on record.

Visit the World Resources Report website for more information on decision-making in a changing climate.

It is too early to tell whether these extreme events are directly caused by human-induced climate change. What is not in dispute is that they are consistent with the broad scientific consensus that links a changing climate with more extreme events and more severe climatic cycles. Equally indisputably, the world is quickly moving towards a much hotter tomorrow.

Global average surface temperature in 2010 tied as the warmest on record. According to NOAA, it also took the honors as the wettest year since records began; a development in line with models that predict that warmer temperatures will increase precipitation. The world has witnessed 0.8˚C (1.5˚F) of warming since 1880, resulting already in significant changes to physical, hydrological and ecological systems. Yet man-made climate change has barely begun to bite. According to a recent UNEP assessment, by 2100, the world can expect global average temperature rises between 2.5˚C and 5˚C (4.5˚F-9˚F) over pre-industrial levels even if all the greenhouse gas emissions cuts pledged by countries in the UN climate negotiations are fulfilled. If these pledges are not honored, warming will be even greater.

The message for governments is clear. As well as urgently cutting emissions, nations everywhere need to take steps to adapt to a very different world. Such steps will require a fundamental shift in how most governments currently plan for climate-related impacts. Not only must we improve our ability to react to extreme weather events, and other climate-related surprises. Just as important, we must proactively prepare countries for new variations in local climate (such as altered monsoon patterns) and long-term changes (such as sea level rise) the combined impacts of which could affect vast populations.

It is imperative that governments start now to incorporate climate risks into plans and policies in sectors such as urban development, coastal planning, agriculture, water and forestry management, and electricity production. If they don’t, major investments by governments and donors may be wasted or quickly become obsolete. And the world’s most vulnerable and resource-poor societies will miss critical opportunities to become more climate-resilient. In Pakistan, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development investments were swept away in the floodwaters.

So how specifically should planners and policy makers go about incorporating climate risks into their decisions? Human society historically has not been good at forward-looking, proactive decision making. We are slow to react to, learn from, and foresee change.

While natural disasters grab the headlines, some countries are pioneering ways to plan for both short- and long-term climate risks.

Yet encouragingly, while natural disasters grab the headlines, below the radar some countries are pioneering ways to plan for both short- and long-term climate risks. Over the past year, the World Resources Report, produced by the World Resources Institute with the UN Development Programme, UN Environment Programme, and the World Bank, has engaged leaders in developing countries to learn about such efforts.

Important lessons are emerging, with governments using innovative policies and pilot projects to learn which interventions can effectively address different climate risks and how to catalyze such action.

Bangladesh has begun to move from disaster relief to disaster preparedness, developing pioneering early warning systems. When Cyclone SIDR battered Bangladesh in 2007, these helped keep the death toll to about 3,400 people, compared with an estimated 140,000 who perished in a 1991 cyclone of similar magnitude.
Vietnam is investing more than US$100m in mangrove restoration to protect coastal towns in anticipation of climate-induced flooding. State-owned plantations have been coupled with new schools, health clinics and roads, as well as forest leases for villagers, to promote acceptance.
In drought-plagued Mali, the national meteorological service transmits seasonal rainfall and soil moisture data to farmers teaching them to interpret the information to manage their crops, with yields and incomes rising in pilot areas.

It is no accident that these initiatives are taking root in poor countries with the most to lose from the many impacts climate change will throw at humanity. Indeed, the developing world, out of necessity, may lead the way in learning to live with a warming planet.