How can climate change concerns be incorporated into development planning processes? This Guidebook introduces the Adaptation Policy Framework (APF) to help project teams work through the conceptual, technical and operational challenges that arise throughout the adaptation process. The development of an adaptation strategy needs to balance reducing climate change impacts with the constraints of national policymaking processes. Whatever adaptation options and measures emerge, packaging these decisions into an effective strategy will require increased policy coherence across economic sectors, societal levels and timeframes.
Globally, countries are already adapting to current climate events on different levels (national, regional, local) and over various timeframes. Adaptation planning occurs primarily through government policymaking.
Developing an adaptation strategy for future climate change requires a key set of objectives. At the broadest level, these should fit in with a nation’s development priorities. The APF is a structured approach to formulating and implementing adaptation strategies, policies, and measures to ensure human development in the face of climate variability and change.
Two key cross-cutting components of the APF are stakeholder engagement and the assessment and enhancement of adaptive capacity. The five basic components of the APF incorporate the following.
- Scoping and designing an adaptation strategy involves a small-scale exploration of all the APF components to get a sense of the ‘big picture’. It aims to ensure the project can be integrated into the national policy process.
- Assessing current vulnerability addresses questions such as where society stands today with respect to climate vulnerability and how successful efforts to adapt are.
- Assessing future climate risks involves developing scenarios of future climate, vulnerability and socio-economic and environmental trends as a basis for considering future climate risks.
- Formulating an adaptation strategy involves the creation of a set of adaptation policy options and measures in response to current vulnerability and future climate risks.
- Continuing the adaptation strategy involves implementing, monitoring, evaluating, and sustaining the initiatives started by the adaptation project. This can be seen as the start of a long-term process of adaptation, begun by a project.
The tasks incorporated within the components above raise a number of institutional, analytical and operational issues. Some of the key issues and overarching considerations for the respective components include:
- Scoping and design: There may be existing projects within a country that can complement adaptation projects. Links and synergies between projects require exploration.
- Assessing current vulnerability: Stakeholders should understand the elements of risk early in the APF process. These risk elements are the magnitude of a climatic event, its likelihood and its possible consequences.
- Assessing future climate risks: Uncertainty permeates future climate-change assessments. Anchoring assessments in current climate risks enables the creation of a road map from existing issues to different climate scenarios.
- Formulating an adaptation strategy: The adaptation strategy should be flexible enough to integrate new elements, including the climate ‘surprises’ that will certainly occur in the future.
- Continuing the adaptation process: Barriers may exist for monitoring and evaluation because of resource constraints and governance issues. These should be openly confronted and possible solutions explored.
