Tag: Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management
Integrated Approach for Cost-Effective Disaster Risk Management
Echoes of Success: Case Studies in the Replication of Asian Development Bank Projects in the People’s Republic of China
Here’s How to Prepare for Disasters, Not Just React to Them
Disasters triggered by natural hazards were once seen as inevitable. They are increasingly understood to be either preventable or potentially much less harmful. Incorporating disaster risk management particularly disaster risk reduction into development programs can mitigate the impacts of these harmful events.
Disasters are not natural. They are closely tied to development activities. They are the undesired outcomes of poorly planned development policy, decisions and practices.
Financial and infrastructure losses related to disasters triggered by natural hazards have grown substantially in many countries.
Disasters can severely threaten efforts to eliminate poverty and those who have recently climbed out of poverty can easily find themselves destitute once again after a calamity.
Poorer people often live in more disaster-prone areas, with poor infrastructure and weak coping capacity, both financially and technically. They are therefore highly vulnerable to the impact of disasters.
Such vulnerability is even more pronounced for medium-sized and small businesses, especially micro-enterprises, which are often unable to pay their debts when their assets are destroyed.
Historically, disasters were considered unpreventable natural events. The approach to disaster management has been predominantly reactive, focusing on managing their impact through immediate relief and recovery assistance.
This traditional disaster management tends to be passive, costly, insufficient and inefficient, failing to address root causes of disasters. Considerable research has revealed that relying solely on post-disaster response consumes substantial human and financial resources, often in repetitive cycles of recovery and loss.
The fact is that the cost and needs of disaster response cannot be met in a growing number of countries, where the impact of earthquakes and floods that occurred years ago are still visible today.
In contrast to traditional disaster management, disaster risk reduction adopts a proactive stance. Disaster risk management begins with disaster risk reduction, which aims to prevent or mitigate the impacts of disasters before they occur and should be fully integrated into the development process, according to ADB’s 2021 Revised Disaster and Emergency Assistance Policy.
Effective disaster risk reduction strategies encompass a wide range of interventions, including hazard mitigation, exposure control, and vulnerability reduction. These strategies are implemented through both structural measures—such as flood defenses and earthquake-resistant buildings—and non-structural measures, including comprehensive land-use planning and stringent building codes.
When disaster risk reduction strategies are no longer cost-efficient, disaster risk management seeks alternative solutions that focus on preparedness and response to manage residual risks, where disaster risk financing instruments can transfer extreme and unabsorbable disaster risks to the insurance industry or capital markets.
Additionally, a robust social protection network is critical to ensure that support is promptly delivered to affected individuals and businesses. An asset registry system helps guide distribution of post-disaster support, along with multi-level coordination among different stakeholders and responders. This helps verify disaster impacts and reduce errors in targeting those most needy during post-disaster relief efforts.
Disaster risk management requires a proactive, integrated approach that prioritizes preventive measures and resilience-building to mitigate the impacts of natural hazards on development and vulnerable populations.
Development decisions should be made carefully, sufficiently exploring and considering major risks due to natural hazards. Failure to consider the full range of disaster risk management measures often leads to inefficient allocation of resources, overlooked synergies, and the introduction of new threats to that very same development process.
Decision makers need to adopt a cost-effective approach to consider the full range of disaster risk management measures within a limited budget, prioritizing those that can yield high direct benefits (loss reduction) as well as co-benefits such as economic development and improvements in environmental, social, and governance aspects.
Deliberations on disaster risk management measures should not be driven solely by the goal of reducing asset losses, as this is unfair to the poor, who possess fewer assets.
Instead, decision-making on disaster risk management measures should prioritize reducing harm to welfare, taking into account the impact of disasters on public and household consumption.
Vulnerable groups, including the poor, elderly, children, disabled individuals, and women, face disproportionate challenges before, during and after disasters. Therefore, disaster risk management measures must be inclusive, starting with comprehensive disaster risk identification and assessment—a step often overlooked due to the lack of proper indicators and data.
Failing to protect these groups can lead to imbalanced development, social instability, and the erosion of efforts towards poverty eradication and sustainable development.
Disaster risk management aims to build resilience to natural hazards and prevent disasters. Resilience is gauged by the ability to reduce immediate losses and recover swiftly. With disaster risk reduction fully implemented in the development process, after a period of recovery and reconstruction, the society will fully return to pre-disaster conditions or even better.
The generation of more disaster risks, due to long-practiced risk-insensitive development, is threatening the achievement of the sustainable development goals by 2030.
Each society faces different challenges due to geographic and economic differences and the impacts of climate change. A full range of disaster risk management measures needs to be available to cost-effectively reduce disaster losses and generate development benefits.
Implementation of an integrated approach for cost-effective disaster risk management requires coherent policy and regulations, vigorous information exchange, and adequate financial and human resources, which remains limited and far from becoming the mainstream of development processes.
A particularly daunting challenge is achieving well-coordinated action among agencies in charge of disaster emergency management and the various development sectors. To achieve sustainable development, it is paramount to build strong competencies and capacities in disaster risk management among various actors.
Lastly, as disasters often transcend geographic and political boundaries, regional collaboration allows countries and regions to leverage shared resources, knowledge, and strategies, addressing common risks and challenges.
By working together, countries and organizations can leverage each other’s strengths and avoid duplicating efforts, while sharing the costs of developing and implementing resilience-building initiatives.
Author
Jinqiang (JC) Chen
Urban Development Specialist (Climate Change), Water and Urban Development Sector Office, ADB Sectors Group
This blog is reproduced from Asian Development Blog.
Financing Climate-Friendly Cooling at City Scale
A FAST Response to Climate Change
The UN’s new initiative presents a promising framework to make agriculture and food systems more sustainable and resilient
Agriculture and food systems are profoundly vulnerable to climate change. Severe droughts and floods, changes in rainfall patterns, and other climatic impacts affect agriculture more than any other sector. Asia and the Pacific, in fact, will be the region most affected by worsening climate impacts; recent events include record-breaking droughts in the Yangtze River basin, which resulted in an estimated $5 billion worth of damage while affecting countless lives.
At the same time, globally, agriculture and food contribute to more than one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on climate change and sustainable land management. This makes food and agriculture critical as both a vulnerable sector heavily affected by climate change and a significant contributor to climate change.
Agriculture and food systems also offer meaningful opportunities to address climate change. One is to achieve more sustainable food security by strengthening the system’s resilience and investing in inclusive adaptation to climate change. Another is to mitigate climate change through emissions reduction and carbon sequestration.
Both these opportunities can be achieved by promoting sustainable agricultural and food systems, and engaging key stakeholder groups, including women — a larger percentage of whom depend on agriculture for their livelihood. This is particularly important in developing countries, which face significant food security challenges. Such a sustainable transformation will significantly contribute to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals while helping maintain the 1.5 C ambition to limit climate change impacts.
Encouragingly, in November 2022, the presidency of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) launched the Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation Initiative (FAST), which is aimed at directing climate resources, particularly finance, to develop more sustainable agriculture and food systems. It will focus on three pillars: finance, knowledge and capacity, and policy. A detailed implementation plan is being finalized, but several critical components are essential to help achieve success.
First, the FAST must promote effective coordination among development partners to identify gaps and avoid duplication of work. The FAST will be facilitated by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and will require active and effective participation by other agencies. Earlier, the Asian Development Bank announced plans to deliver more than $14 billion from 2022 through 2025 to support food security, including through strengthening food systems against climate change and preventing biodiversity loss.
Other organizations are on the same track. The World Bank has made agriculture and food priorities in its first climate change action plan, aiming to leverage more resources for sustainable agriculture. Development partners will need to work together under the FAST framework for meaningful impacts in the developing world.
Second, the FAST must support enabling environments, including policy incentives and governance that promote inclusive, climate-positive change in food systems. Policies and institutions at the local, national, and international levels need to incentivize the development and adoption of new technologies and practices and ensure adequate finance, including private sector investments. Governments or inter-governmental agencies should take the leading role in establishing sound policies and incentives, and ensuring effective implementation.
Third, the FAST should support stakeholders along the value chain, from production, processing, and storage to trading and consumption, to improve their resilience to climate change. For example, higher temperatures and humidity lower on-farm productivity as weeds and disease increase the risk of post-harvest losses, particularly for traders and aggregators who deliver in bulk to processors. Climate adaptation can be strengthened through storage technologies such as cold chain and improved drying techniques.
Fourth, the FAST must promote promising innovations to support adaptation and build resilience while increasing productivity. New crop varieties can better withstand climate shocks and improve yields. Solar energy can be used for irrigation, storage, transportation, and processing. Digital technology can expand access to farming knowledge and services allowing farmers to adapt practices to local conditions and improve market access and profitability.
Climate-smart practices, such as no-till farming, bio-waste management, agro-forestry, and landscape management, will also support mitigation by sequestering carbon and reducing GHG emissions. Automatically controlled drip irrigation combined with dynamic soil testing can improve system resilience to extreme droughts.
The FAST should also campaign for responsible consumer behavior to minimize individual’s ecological or carbon footprint, especially in advanced countries. Reducing consumption of processed food and red meats, as well as food waste can significantly reduce emissions.
Finally, and most importantly, the FAST must focus on farmers, as they are the primary agents for sustainable transformation on the ground and are most vulnerable to climate change, especially women, who represent approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force globally (47.5 percent in the PRC). Critically, women farmers show greater sensitivity toward environmental activities and are more involved with sustainable agriculture practices. They must be equipped with sufficient knowledge, technologies, and incentives to make transformation happen.
The FAST presents a promising framework to make our agriculture and food systems much more sustainable and resilient to climate change, and to reduce carbon emissions. Its success depends on a comprehensive, inclusive, and integrated approach that considers all stakeholders along the value chain.
Author
Zhiming Niu
Senior Project Officer (Environment), East Asia Department, Asian Development Bank
This Op-Ed is reproduced from China Daily.
100 Climate Actions from Cities in Asia and the Pacific
Green Urban Planning: Lessons from Mongolia on Climate Proofing Cities in Cold Regions
Meeting Global Climate Ambitions through Regional Collaboration
At the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from Nov 7-18, the global community came together to discuss how to accelerate climate action. The findings are clear — global climate commitments and needed action are set to fail in keeping global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius tipping point.
The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly severe in Asia and the Pacific, and they demand our urgent attention and intervention.
The drought in Sichuan province this summer was a stark reminder of this reality. Home to 94 million people, Sichuan normally generates 80-85 percent of its electricity demand through hydropower. This constitutes around 25 percent of the PRC’s overall hydropower generation; equivalent to that of France, Turkiye, and Norway combined.
When reservoir levels fell due to the extreme drought in August, hydropower could no longer generate sufficient electricity. The surrounding processor chip factories — dependent on hydropower — were forced to close, dealing a blow to the livelihoods of workers and their families. The incident also showed how climate change impacts are interlinked, as chips from Sichuan are critical components globally for smartphones, car manufacturing, and renewable energy technology.
The need to adapt to the impacts of climate change has never been more urgent. This requires unprecedented collaboration to drive innovative solutions, both scientific and financial, that can be shared across communities. By working together, we can leverage resources to prevent catastrophic damage to human health, our economies, and social well-being by reducing the severity of climate-induced disasters triggered by natural hazards, and by mitigating the damage done by slower onset impacts such as sea level rise and increased desertification.
The PRC’s new National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 is an insightful and integrated endeavor to steer the country toward climate-resilient development. The strategy was prepared by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, but released jointly by 17 national ministries, reflecting the urgency and deep understanding of climate change as a cross-cutting global phenomena. The Asian Development Bank and the Global Center on Adaptation are proud to have provided support to develop this new strategy.
The strategy emphasizes preparedness and prevention, and comprehensively addresses vulnerabilities such as extreme weather events. It also considers emerging threats such as climate-induced migration of vector-borne diseases. The strategy focuses on the need for sound governance, and on the social and economic impacts of climate change including on livelihoods, health, education and urban planning.
Crucially, the strategy pushes the boundaries of adaptation by suggesting approaches such as assisted relocation for residents who live in vulnerable areas considered “high-risk”. Asia and the Pacific may see hundreds of millions of climate refugees by 2050 due to sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and water insecurity.
According to a study, eight Asian nations — the PRC, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan — account for 70 percent of people living on “at-risk land”.
The PRC recognizes that the global climate challenge demands integrated solutions which address adaptation and mitigation simultaneously. For example, climate-smart agriculture promotes more resilient and sustainable production and value chains while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Afforestation and wetlands amelioration and conservation offer resiliency benefits while sequestering carbon. This integrated approach is extremely important to leverage impact amid scarce resources and an increasing need for climate action.
The Asian Development Bank’s Yellow River Ecological Corridor (YREC), launched in 2021, supports the regional climate adaptation priorities of the PRC’s strategy. It is a comprehensive approach, designed to protect and restore the Yellow River basin’s diverse and fragile ecosystems, address climate change mitigation and adaptation, and enable more equitable and sustainable green rural-urban economic development.
The YREC will partner with the Chinese government to develop a basin climate risk assessment report, establish a climate change management framework, and prepare an adaptation plan. The strategy provides sound guidance for this work and serves as an excellent platform for climate engagement and action at the sub-regional level and among development partners.
It is also a meaningful tool to promote South-South cooperation, reflecting the global nature of the climate crisis. the PRC already has 38 climate change cooperation agreements with other countries. It has helped to develop community-led early warning systems for floods and provided micro-satellites and meteorological mobile stations to Ethiopia, Bolivia, and Uruguay, while supporting climate-related capacity development in over 100 countries.
As we move to implement COP 27 agreements, the 1.5 degree aspiration remains. Time is running out for action to mitigate climate change, and the economies of Asia and the Pacific are uniquely vulnerable.
The PRC’s National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 provides a tangible national blueprint that can help guide other countries looking to prepare climate change action plans. These plans require large amounts of financing, yet climate action must also be seen as an opportunity, not only as a cost. Smart climate investments create new business ventures, help communities become more resilient and sustainable, and integrate climate awareness and action across the economy and wider society.
We need to work together on climate action to provide finance and sound governance, foster knowledge and planning, seek innovation, and share capacity development to secure a sustainable and resilient Asia and the Pacific.
Authors
Safdar Parvez
Country Director, PRC Resident Mission, ADB
Thomas Panella
Director, Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture Division, East Asia Department, ADB
This Op-Ed is reproduced from China Daily.
