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Adaptation and Risk Reduction

Promoting sustainable development in a changing climate

IISD is committed to developing the strategies, tools and policy advice needed to respond effectively to the increasingly noticeable impacts of climate change and its ramifications for people. Our work in Canada and developing countries aims to:

• Increase understanding of effective responses to the complex socioeconomic and environmental impacts of climate change;
• Develop tools and processes to facilitate these responses;
• Encourage integration of adaptation considerations into routine decision making; and
• Understand the role that adaptation actions may play in either promoting or undermining peacebuilding efforts.

Highlighted Publications

• In the OECD Environment Working Paper, Harmonising Climate Risk Management: Adaptation screening and assessment tools for development co-operation, Anne Hammill and Thomas Tanner explore the extent to which tools designed to screen for climate change risks and facilitate adaptation are meeting user needs, and whether opportunities exist for streamlining the tools’ landscape. Focusing primarily on process guidance tools, the authors suggest that the increasing number and diversity of tools available makes it desirable to harmonize aspects of risk screening and assessment processes. Recommendations regarding how harmonization could be achieved is provided.

• Participatory scenario development is a process in which stakeholders creatively explore the future in a policy-relevant way. Participatory Scenario Development Approaches for Identifying Pro-Poor Adaptation Options presents major lessons learned from the application of participatory scenario-based tools within the World Bank’s Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change project. It illustrates how such tools provide opportunities to increase the usability of information on climate change impacts when developing adaptation responses and explores linkages between development, projected climate change and relevant adaptation responses. The authors are Livia Bizikova, Samantha Boardley and Simon Mead.

A full list of IISD’s publications in the area of Adaptation and Risk Reduction is available through our Publications Centre.

Contents

• CRiSTAL Project Management Tool
  The project management tool CRiSTAL (Community-Based Risk Screening Tool—Adaptation and Livelihoods) enables project planners and managers to assess an intervention's impact on local capacity to cope with climate stress and to think about how to adjust project activities so that, at the very least, they do not undermine local coping capacity.

• Climate Change and Security
  Climate change could affect political and economic stability in many countries. Through partnerships at the national and local levels, IISD is developing effective ways to address emerging problems.

• Independent Research
  This section highlights collaborative research efforts in the area of adaptation and risk reduction undertaken by IISD and its partners in government, research institutes and non-governmental organizations based in developed and developing countries.

• Fostering Adaptation in Eastern and Southern Africa
  Recognizing the high vulnerability of African countries to the impacts of climate change, the ACCESA project aimed to reduce the vulnerability of communities in Kenya, Mozambique and Rwanda to the impacts of climate change.

• Adaptive Policy-Making
  Designing policies in a world of uncertainty, change and surprise is a challenge facing policy-makers in all sectors. This multi-year project (2005 to 2009) advanced understanding of adaptive policies, particularly in the agriculture and water sectors, to enhance capacity to respond to both anticipated and unanticipated conditions.

• Building Resilience on the Prairies
  Against the background of the Canadian Prairies, this project examined how agricultural communities have adapted to past climate stress to identify ways to promote adaptive capacity and build resilience to present climate change.

• Lake Balaton Regional Vulnerability Assessment
  This project helped enhance the resilience of Hungary's Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, to multiple forces of change by combining integrated vulnerability assessment with the development of multi-scale adaptation strategies.