Adaptation to climate change in development policy
Climate change is set to radically alter the conditions for human development in many regions of the world. The developing countries above all will be hard-hit by rising temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including e.g. drought, flooding, and storms. If no adaption measures are taken, the growing scarcity of freshwater may have sharply negative economic and social consequences, above all for agriculture, the energy sector, tourism, health, and food security.
Financing:
Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Time frame:
2009 - 2010
/
completed
Project description
Climate change therefore needs to be viewed as a cross-cutting factor and to be included in all development planning. In the coming years and decades, adaptation to climate change will be one of the core elements of poverty reduction and development cooperation in general. This will radically change the development agenda.
In this connection the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute (DIE), together with Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, in 2008 worked out a proposal on how the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) can best integrate climate change into development policy. The core of the proposal is to integrate policies and measures geared to adaptation to climate change into development planning and sector-related decision-making processes (mainstreaming). The benefits would include improved ability to (i) secure the long-term sustainability of investments, (ii) reduce the vulnerability of advances in development to climate change both today and in the future, (iii) reduce the vulnerability of the population, and in particular the poor, to the impacts of climate change. Mainstreaming can be used to make more efficient and effective use of available resources than would be possible if climate-related measures were planned and implemented in isolation from development investment.
There exist three complementary approaches for mainstreaming efforts: safeguards against climate risks (mainstreaming minimum), reduction of population vulnerability (mainstreaming plus), and improvements of policy coordination within the development community (in the EU, the DAC, with the multilateral organisations), with other ministries and departments in Germany, within the EU, and in the framework of the ongoing global climate negotiations.
In 2009 the strategy proposal was reworked into a policy paper for the German development ministry (MBZ) whose aim was to urge the inclusion of concrete adaptation measures in individual country portfolios.