Adaptation finance is crucial for economic development in countries in South Asia and beyond. To date, international climate finance mechanisms have fallen short of delivering the necessary resources to tackle climate change. This is especially true of adaptation finance, which remains severely underfunded. To successfully prepare for climate change governments will have to mobilise their own fiscal resources and go beyond donor funding to reach their own development goals.
ACT has devised and tested a framework that will enable governments to integrate climate change adaptation and resilience into government plans, policies, and budgets at the national and subnational level. The Financing Framework for Resilient Growth (FFRG) provides a way to estimate the economic cost of climate change damages, quantify current expenditure on adaptation and track it through departmental budgets. For example, in Bihar, India, ACT reviewed 787 budget lines which are relevant for climate change and used the FFRG to estimate that $145 million worth of the total ‘benefits’ from this expenditure are tackling the impacts of climate change through enabling adaptation.
The FFRG framework has been applied in South Asia but can be used to inform policy and practice around the world.
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Successful adaptation requires governments to change their investment, planning and policy processes. To support these actions, practitioners must engage with governance processes and identify the barriers and opportunities for climate adaptation mainstreaming. However, when tackling climate change, governments often do not fully consider how to integrate climate change resilience building into their decision making.
ACT has been working in South Asian countries to help transform government systems to increase adaptation to climate change. ACT’s work on strengthening governance systems to deliver adaptation is focused on three dimensions:
- Entry points: Opportunities for integrating climate considerations into the planning and policy process.
- Enabling environment: The characteristics that help support the successful adoption of climate change adaptation policies & practices.
- Political economy drivers: The factors that influence and affect the enabling environment.
The ACT framework for mainstreaming adaptation to climate change within governance systems can be used to inform policy and practice in South Asia and around the world.
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Agriculture is one of the most climate vulnerable sectors, being sensitive to extreme events such as floods and droughts, as well as long-term changes to rainfall and temperature that can lead to altered growing seasons. This is particularly problematic for development in South Asia given the high dependence of its population on agriculture as the primary livelihood. The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme, has been working in five South Asian countries to help increase the resilience of agricultural systems. It has done this by applying a ‘Climate Resilient Agriculture’ (CRA) approach.
The CRA approach targets the full agricultural process from farm through to market and ACT uses the following entry points to increase resilience:
- Policy and institutions.
- Finance
- Information and knowledge management
- Technology and asset management
The ACT framework for mainstreaming adaptation to climate change within agricultural systems can be used to inform policy and practice in South Asia and around the world.
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Countries in South Asia already face considerable water management challenges: water resources are overexploited and depleting fast, and institutions are struggling to manage and allocate water effectively. Climate change will exacerbate existing problems through irregular rainfall patterns and increased incidence of floods and droughts.
The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme has been actively working in five South Asian countries to help governments plan for, and manage, the impacts of climate change in the water sector. ACT has championed a Climate-Resilient Water Management (CRWM) approach as a way of increasing the resilience of water systems on which billions of people rely.
This learning paper outlines the core elements of the CRWM framework and provides examples from ACT’s work employing the framework across the region. The methodology has been deployed in South Asia, but will be of relevance to practitioners and policy makers working in water resource management around the world.
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Climate Resilient Water Management needs to be informed by reliable information about physical exposure and social vulnerability to climate shocks and stresses in order to create a comprehensive narrative of the impact that climate extremes, uncertainty, and variability can have on water resources management. This requires combining different types of climate information. ACT’s new paper seeks to inform government agencies and individual officials, practitioners and donors, researchers and wider civil society on:
- How to understand the role of climate information in producing analysis including a typology of different types of climate information; and
- How to best use climate information to inform and guide the policy-making processes.
Based on experience and learning from ACT projects, the paper presents 10 key recommendations for integrating climate information into water resources management. This is targeted at those seeking to design and implement CRWM programmes and initiatives, to help overcome some of the critical challenges to accessing and using climate information.
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The scale and uncertainty of the long-term impacts of climate change, its complex and cross-cutting nature, the urgency of action required, and the power asymmetries that exist between different actors mean that managing climate change poses an acute institutional challenge. Most countries are struggling to build the institutional capabilities required to tackle climate change across different levels of government.
The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme has worked at the national and sub-national level in five countries in South Asia to help strengthen institutions capabilities to integrate climate change into policies, plans and budgets, and to attract climate change investment. This learning paper and brief present a new framework, based on learning from the programme, for strengthening institutional climate capabilities to guide those designing, planning and delivering other programmes and initiatives.
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There is now a large body of evidence on technical approaches to mainstream climate change adaptation in policymaking. Tried-and-tested interventions include: undertaking risk assessments to develop the evidence base, building capacity by training key decision makers, providing decision aids such as risk screening and climate budgeting tools etc. However, informal approaches to influencing policy and action on adaptation play an equally important role and need to be explicitly considered within technical assistance programmes. Informal influencing approaches consider social norms, customs or traditions that shape thought and behaviour, and an understanding of the mechanisms of local political networks.
The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme has been working in partnership with ten national and sub-national governments in South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, to strengthen systems of planning and delivery for adaptation to climate change. This learning paper and brief highlight the role of policy entrepreneurs, who navigate the political complexity of formal and informal systems of governance to promote successful adaptation mainstreaming processes.
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The costs of adaptation to climate change in developing countries have been estimated to reach $70 - $100 billion per year between 2010 and 2050. Unlocking private finance can support public decision-makers facing constrained public budgets to achieve climate resilience by leveraging the ingenuity, skills, and financial resources of businesses and the larger financial sector. Moreover, the private sector itself is gradually becoming aware of the physical risks and opportunities arising from a changing climate.
There is a growing recognition of the need for the private sector to mainstream climate resilience across its activities but also re-direct financial flows to avoid climate-induced economic and financial shocks. The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme has been working across South Asia to integrate climate change adaptation into development planning, and delivery. An important objective of ACT is to leverage finance for climate action. This learning brief focuses on the ways in which the private sector can be engaged to unlock finance for adaptation; highlighting the drivers, barriers and enablers that impact private sector participation. The ACT learning brief presents a framework of five approaches that policymakers, practitioners and donors can use to motivate the private sector to invest in climate change adaptation. The framework is illustrated with examples from ACT, highlighting the lessons learnt, and presenting key recommendations to mobilise private sector engagement and private finance in adaptation.
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This paper contributes to improving understanding of how funders, practitioners and other stakeholders can support and facilitate transformation in adaptation to climate change. It uses the latest academic literature, as well as learning from practice, to put forward a conceptual framework for determining the likelihood of an adaptation initiative delivering transformation. This framework unpacks the term ‘transformation’ into three components:
- Enabling environment factors: These are the factors that should be in place to be able to achieve meaningful, lasting and fundamental change. They include political will and the policy environment, evidence and information, and awareness and capacity.
- Transformational domains: These constitute areas within which transformational change takes place. They include public policy and governance, innovation, and social and behaviour change.
- Characteristics: These are indicators of transformation and therefore should be features of initiatives aiming to support transformation. They include catalytic, scale, sustainable, inclusive, and systemic.
The paper then applies the framework to examples of adaptation interventions being delivered as part of the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme.
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An adaptive programme management approach is well suited to address the complex and interconnected impacts of climate change facing developing countries. The pathway to adapting to climate change is unknown, and there are many deep-rooted institutional, political, economic and social barriers. Adaptive programmes can provide the flexibility to allow those delivering technical assistance to support governments to experiment with different entry-points for adaptation, and learn and adapt from successes and failures.
The Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme has been engaged with national and sub-national governments across South Asia over the last four years, to assist in integrating climate change adaptation into development planning and delivery. As the programme draws to a close, this learning brief reflects on some of the major lessons learned on the challenges and opportunities of using an adaptive programme management approach to support governments to adapt to climate change. It sets out a framework for an adaptive programme, including a set of essential core principles:
- An evolving Theory of Change;
- Locally-led and politically savvy delivery approach;
- Experimentation and learning; and
- Stakeholder alignment.
It also includes two sets of essential resources required: Management flexibility and the availability of adequate finances. The framework is illustrated with examples of the challenges ACT faced in operationalising this framework, and how the programme overcame them.
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The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was established to support developing countries to take ambitious action on climate change. The flow of climate finance from industrialised to developing countries, particularly via the GCF, is a crucial component of international agreements on climate change. However, capacity constraints and the complex procedures for accessing funding are affecting many developing countries’ ability to compete fairly and effectively for the GCF. This learning paper and brief provide insights from the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme in South Asia to improve country ‘readiness’ to access climate finance.
The learning paper presents the ‘demand side’ country perspective on the challenges faced and some of the strategies that countries have employed to overcome them. It presents a framework for strengthening access to the GCF, looking at entry-points and strategies that governments, funders and practitioners can use.
