How can the international community accelerate progress on climate change adaptation while ensuring sustainable development? This report argues that the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events requires the proactive implementation of new tools to accelerate climate change adaptation. Disaster risk reduction methods should be linked with adaptation strategies to provide affected regions with the capacity and funding both to recover from extreme weather events and to create long-term resilience and sustainable development.
Climate change adaptation (CCA) must be urgently mainstreamed into all sectors of society. This involves striking a balance between: a) requesting and providing additional resources to prepare for and adapt to the known and unknown effects of climate change; and b) continuing to support sustainable development. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is a promising tool in maintaining this balance. It can promote resilience and adaptive capacities particularly regarding extreme events linked to climate change. It can be used both to restore communities affected by disasters and to take advantage of the opportunities that catastrophes provide for change and for creating long-term resilience.
While the potential for linking DRR and CCA has already received growing acceptance within the scientific and also the humanitarian and development communities, the integration of both fields has hardly been put into practice. A review of current strategies to link DRR and CCA at the international, national and local level reveals the following key findings:
- Communication and cooperation between the administrative entities/ministries to which DRR and CCA belong need to be improved
- Climate change data must become more robust, in particular data and prognostic capacity regarding extreme events linked to climate change
- Monitoring after disasters needs to be established to gather more information on how disasters and disaster response catalyse change and influence adaptive capacity
- Differences between short-term funding for disaster response by humanitarian donors and the long-term financial support needed for adaptation strategies inhibits cooperation
- Response, recovery and reconstruction after disasters have not yet been sufficiently used to promote and realise vulnerability reduction and climate change adaptation.
The international community must outline a clear strategy on how societies can adapt to the unavoidable consequences of climate change. Disaster risk reduction should be a strong pillar within this strategy and within the post-Kyoto protocol in order to help communities to build resilience and live with change. Recommendations to achieve this include:
- Adopt cross-sectoral, multi-scale and integrative approaches to link DRR and CCA and to mainstream both into other activities on sustainable development
- Develop standardised methods, databases and quality criteria for moving from impact and needs assessment after disasters to a forward-looking vulnerability, capacity and adaptation assessment
- Improve disaster management and coordination, especially response capacities, focusing on most vulnerable regions for climate change
- Create flexible funding schemes that shift from short-term and project-oriented financing to the support of forward-oriented strategies that lead to long-term sustainability
- Develop a comprehensive and internationally-accepted framework that could serve as a conceptual and practical guide for implementing the integration of DRR and CCA.
