The need to mainstream adaptation to climate change into development planning and ongoing sectoral decision-making is increasingly recognised, and several bilateral and multilateral development agencies are starting to take an interest. Over the past years at least six development agencies have screened their project portfolios, generally with two goals in mind: (1) to ascertain the extent to which existing development projects already consider climate risks or address vulnerability to climate variability and change, and (2) to identify opportunities for incorporating climate change explicitly into future projects. As each portfolio screening was conducted independently, the broader lessons emerging from the screenings have not been systematically analysed. In this paper we assess the screening activities to date, focusing on both the results and the methods applied. Based on this assessment we identify opportunities for development agencies to expand their current focus on the links between climate and development. Most agencies already consider climate change as a real but uncertain threat to future development, but they have given less thought to how different development patterns might affect vulnerability to climate change. The screenings undertaken have shown the need to take a comprehensive approach to adaptation and its integration into development planning and sectoral decision-making, and a number of policy initiatives have been taken to promote such integration. We provide some initial guidance as to how portfolio screening can be carried out in a way that would allow agencies to assess systematically the relevance of climate change to their ongoing and planned development projects.
Once it was an environmental issue, then an energy problem, now climate change is being recast as a security threat. So far, the debate has focused on creating a security ‘hook’, illustrated by anecdote, to invest climate negotiations with a greater sense of urgency. Political momentum behind the idea of climate change as a security threat has progressed quickly, even reaching the United Nations Security Council. This article reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa and analyses the role of climate change adaptation policies in future conflict prevention. Africa, with its history of ethnic, resource and interstate conflict, is seen by many as particularly vulnerable to this new type of security threat, despite being the continent least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Projected climatic changes for Africa suggest a future of increasingly scarce water, collapsing agricultural yields, encroaching desert and damaged coastal infrastructure. Such impacts, should they occur, would undermine the ‘carrying capacity’ of large parts of Africa, causing destabilizing population movements and raising tensions over dwindling strategic resources. In such cases, climate change could be a factor that tips fragile states into socio‐economic and political collapse. Climate change is only one of many security, environmental and developmental challenges facing Africa. Its impacts will be magnified or moderated by underlying conditions of governance, poverty and resource management, as well as the nature of climate change impacts at local and regional levels. Adaptation policies and programmes, if implemented quickly and at multiple scales, could help avert climate change and other environmental stresses becoming triggers for conflict. But, adaptation must take into account existing social, political and economic tensions and avoid exacerbating them.
Division of Sustainable Development, 'Climate change is an inevitable and urgent global challenge with long-term implications for the sustainable development of all countries.' 1 What are these implications? In the following pages, we argue that while the threats and other challenges associated with climate change bolster the case for sustainable development, climate change impacts will tend to intensify the forces that, for decades, have constrained or obstructed progress towards sustainable development in many parts of the world. We first discuss the goals of sustainable development and the various political, economic and other constraints they face. We next consider the ways in which climate change may intensify some of these constraints. We conclude with some suggestions for practitioners and policymakers. 1 http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/dsd_aofw_cc/cc_index.shtml, accessed 9 Oct. 2009. 2 World Commission on Environment and Development, Our common future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Full text available at http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm, accessed 9 Oct. 2009. 3 These United Nations reports are available online: Agenda 21 (1992) at http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/, The programme for the further implementation of Agenda 21 (1997) at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/spec/ aress19-2.htm, Investing in development: a practical plan for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (2005) at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml, and the Johannesburg plan of implementation (2005) at http://
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