Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which include, amongst others, sea-level rise, natural disasters, changing precipitation and temperature patterns with respective negative impacts on livelihoods, health, productivity, infrastructure, and food security. To further reduce poverty and inequality and to ensure sustainable growth, it will be essential to reduce climate change-related losses and increase coping ability.
Globally, there is a general consensus that the work on adaptation and climate resilience has to be prioritized and that development operations must be consistent with countries’ climate-resilient development pathways in line with the Paris Agreement.
Current adaptation and climate resilience actions are not sufficient, both in scope and ambition, in light of the increased occurrence of slow- and rapid-onset climate-related shocks and stresses, and they lack the necessary integration to guarantee a well-planned adaptation process across sectors and government levels.
There has been a clear evolution in the global adaptation agenda since the 1996 United Nations Climate Change Conference (second Conference of the Parties COP2) and the adaptation roadmap developed at the COPs contains many milestones that have helped countries build national adaptation agendas, as in the case of National Communications which identify vulnerable systems and define adaptation priorities.
Lately, the development of long-term adaptation strategies has been gaining traction and many countries have started to recognize these as necessary instruments for sustainable adaptation and climate resilience action in line with the requirements of the Paris Agreement.
Lessons learned from the COPs and experiences from implemented projects in the field throughout the last decade have been instrumental for establishing a universally recognized iterative process to enhance climate-change adaptation that involves four core steps:
i) assess climate-change impacts, vulnerability, climate change-related risks, and climate resilience,
ii) plan for climate-change adaptation,
iii) implement respective adaptation measures, and
iv) monitor and evaluate climate-change adaptation results.
Although significant work has been carried out in the first two steps, implementing adaptation measures across development projects, beyond specific adaptation activities, and monitoring and evaluation of achieved results are still lagging behind. Additional work is required to help countries and development financiers systematically consider climate-change adaptation and resilience in development projects and monitor and evaluate results. Principles, criteria, and tools are needed to incorporate climate resilience elements throughout the project cycle and to define fit-for-purpose metrics to track climate resilience outputs and outcomes at the project level.
A conceptual framework to identify climate resilience opportunities
With this in mind, the IDB’s Climate Change Division has developed a technical reference document with a general conceptual framework to guide IDB project teams from different sectors through how to identify climate resilience opportunities and define indicators at the project level that will facilitate the monitoring and assessment of climate resilience results.
In this conceptual framework, we define climate resilience as the ability of households, communities, and systems to anticipate, absorb, and recover from weather shocks and slow-moving changes, and to positively adapt and transform in the face of long-term stresses, change, and uncertainty induced by climate change.
We focus on two climate resilience capacities that we want to strengthen through IDB projects:
- absorptive capacity, the capacity to reduce losses resulting from extreme weather events and/or slow-moving changes by taking actions ex ante and
- restorative capacity, the capacity to recover from losses and damages that result from extreme weather events and/or slow-moving changes by taking actions ex post, including “building back better”.
Both of these can have a transformative dimension to create a fundamentally new system. Given adaptation is a “learning-by doing” process the concept of transformative adaptation can also be associated to the degree to which a system can build the capacity to learn and adapt.
We believe that focusing on (transformative) absorptive and restorative capacities will help project teams to design project measures that address specific elements, or attributes, that enhance these climate resilience capacities: protection, robustness, preparedness, recovery, diversification, redundancy, integration/connectedness, and flexibility and the related sub-elements modularity, managing slow variables and feedback, learning/awareness, reparability, reconstruction, building back better, polycentric governance systems, complex adaptive systems thinking, and options.
These climate resilience elements are an important tool for seizing climate resilience opportunities, designing projects that are climate-resilient and/or build climate resilience, and they help to characterize climate resilience-related project activities at the output level, thus providing a basis for developing output-level climate resilience indicators.
At the outcome level, activities that enhance (transformative) absorptive and restorative capacities will contribute to decreased monetary or human losses that arise from future climate changes or weather events, and/or an increased ability to cope across IDB projects and amongst partner communities, institutions, and clients. These results will be measured by outcome indicators that describe reduced losses or increased coping ability.
Establishing a conceptual foundation with examples that illustrate the use of the proposed framework in different sectors is a first step in the implementation of a systematic process to define climate resilience indicators in development operations. We hope that the conceptual foundations, guidance, and examples laid out in the technical reference document will allow project teams to increasingly seize climate resilience opportunities in IDB projects, to identify suitable results indicators, and to later evaluate the effectiveness of implemented adaptation and climate resilience activities. Future work within the IDB will include the development of sectoral briefs and the creation of a climate resilience metrics database.
Designing interventions to build or ensure climate resilience and to lead transformational change is a complex endeavor, so is defining respective results indicators, including adequate targets and baseline data, and attributing observed changes in reduced losses and increased coping ability. However, as project teams and stakeholders across the LAC region will increasingly ensure the climate-resilience of development projects and develop projects that specifically aim at building climate resilience, the understanding of climate resilience opportunities, transformational change, and metrics to effectively and efficiently monitor and evaluate project results will also increase.
The technical reference document “Identification of Climate Resilience Opportunities and Metrics in Financing Operations” can be downloaded here.
Photo credits: Richard Brunsveld, Unsplash
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