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A collapsed irrigation system has led the local
community to
try and improvise a solution—with unfortunate
timing as the
rice fields need the water now for spring
yields.
Credit: UNDP in Indonesia
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Helping at-risk
communities adapt to climate change impacts is an important part of
the Paris Climate Change agreement, but adaptation will not be
complete without considering disaster risk.
Disasters and climate change pose major
challenges to sustainable development. They undermine livelihoods, access to
natural resources, and food security for billions of people. From 1980 to 2012, disasters caused nearly $3.8 billion in economic loss
and claimed a total of 1.4 million lives.
In developing
countries, vulnerable population’s ability to recover from the impact of these
events can be weakened by poverty, inadequate or unsustainable development
practices, environmental degradation, and population growth.
When it comes to
climate change, there is no shortage of urgency. We are no longer placing our
worry for the future in our grandchildren’s era. Our immediate global condition
is at stake.
If you ask the
pastoralists in the Turkana region of Kenya – a place already facing drought
every two to three years – they will tell you first hand that the rain they
depend on has become completely unreliable. For them, as for millions more,
risk management now has to be calibrated to an ever-changing climate in order
to be effective.
At the same
time, as we rush to adapt to climate change, we must not forget the resources
and lessons offered from decades of risk management to address landslides,
earthquakes, floods, droughts, and storms—encompassing both climate risk and
non-climate risk.
During a recent
visit to a village in rural Indonesia in March I saw firsthand the impact of
disaster on climate adaptation initiatives. Just the year before, an adaptation
project had been implemented—benefiting the local women in particular with
alternative livelihoods – introducing an irrigation system for traditional and
new crops.
On paper this
sounds wonderful, and in many respects it is, however, in person you would see
that the location of this village is on a very steep mountainside extremely
prone to landslides. No risk assessment (nor risk-mitigating measures) had been
completed, and a recent landslide had completely destroyed the irrigation
channel.
Despite the
ingenuity of the community to devise a makeshift replacement channel, the
village now faces severe losses in their crop yield this year.
Had a risk
assessment been done to catalogue the likelihood of a landslide, risk
mitigation and management measures could have been added on to the project,
preventing losses.
2016 represents
an opportunity for disaster risk management because of three important global
policy agendas. Never before has the world been so committed—and in favor of
working in tandem—to achieving sustainable development, reducing disaster
risks, and adapting to and combatting climate change.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk
Reduction was adopted in 2015 and promotes actions
that go beyond reactionary disaster management to addressing the complex nature
of risk, including from climate change.
The Paris
Climate Agreement marks
a critical opportunity to launch an era of innovation, emphasizing adaptation,
mitigation and national targets that can accelerate low-emission and
climate-resilient development. And uniting them all are the Sustainable
Development Goals, the
ambitious agenda that plots progress on everything from food security to
education to resilient infrastructure.
Having these
agendas in place at the global level is highly motivating, but what we need now
is effective action on the ground that will not fail the ‘last-mile’
communities we support. This very simply means working together.
A longstanding
perception is finally changing—that limited resources means investment in one
area takes away from another. The reality on the ground is proving time and
again that strategic investment in combined approaches not only maximizes
co-benefits but also protects and makes investments sustainable.
Disaster risk
reduction and climate change adaptation both share an overarching aim to reduce
vulnerability and build resilience as a means to achieve sustainable human
development. Nevertheless, these two practices have often been implemented
separately, thus creating duplications and in some cases competition reducing
progress towards the shared objective.
This has to
change. The Integrated Climate Risk Management Programme, funded by the
Government of Sweden, is an example where participating countries have been
using integration to make headway for sustainable development at national and
local levels, while being connected to a global South-South network to exchange
tools and good practices.
The support has
enabled early warning systems, and riverbed and slope stabilization in Nepal;
risk-informed livelihood diversification in Kenya where pastoralists are taking
up bee-keeping; and climate-smart agriculture and agroforestry in Uganda. These
interventions were built on and informed by an integrated and evidence-based
review of local contexts, including risk-profiles.
This brought
together both climate change and gender-sensitive risk analyses and led to a
better approach that addresses climate change and possible disasters in tandem.
Lessons need to
be shared and good practices like this need to be expanded. Development, if it
is going to be sustainable must be resilient. We will fall short of true
resilience if disaster risk is not recalibrated to climate change and equally
if adaptation is not risk-informed.
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Jen Stephens is Programme Coordinator,
Integrated Climate Risk Management Programme in the United Nations
Development Program’s Bureau for Policy and Programming Support.
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