Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing World Bank Group Experience

Phase III of the World Bank Group and Climate Change

Developing countries are not yet well adapted even to current climate risks: floods, droughts and storm.  Yet those risks are becoming harsher as the world warms, climate extremes become more intense, and the oceans rise – the consequences of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

 

This evaluation draws lessons from World Bank Group experience with adaptation to both currentlevels of climate variability and ongoing climate change. It reviews the impact of longer-standing efforts to deal with climate variability, for instance via drought relief, sustainable land management, and flood control. The evaluation also looks at how, and how well, the World Bank Group has incorporated climate change risks into the design and appraisal of long-lived infrastructure. It assesses early lessons from a new crop of activities that explicitly grapple with climate adaptation at the national level.

Two kinds of climate risk, three kinds of adaptation

People need to be resilient both to today’s climate risks and those that are emerging. There are three ways to do this: two of them desirable, one not.


Closing today’s adaptation gap. The first is to help poor countries adapt to today’s challenges in a way that makes them more prepared for tomorrow’s. While there’s a role for dams and seawalls, building up institutions will be critical for this. Agricultural research and extension, disaster risk management systems, river basin management organizations – improvements in all of these will help right now, and will lay the foundations for the sophisticated organizations that will be needed to confront the unprecedented climate situations of the 2030s and beyond. In Sub-Saharan Africa it is particularly important to build up the hydrometeorological data systems that can help people manage agriculture and disaster risks today, while providing a more solid basis for planning long term investments in hydropower and irrigation systems as the climate changes.


Maladaptation. The second kind of adaptation is a trap to be avoided. Well-meaning efforts to cope with today’s climate variability can backfire in the longer run. Planting exotic trees in China’s Loess Plateau, for instance, succeeded in boosting farmers’ incomes and reducing terrible erosion problems – but is now recognized as having drawn down scarce groundwater.


Anticipatory adaptation. The third kind of adaptation involves acting now to avert severe but long-term threats, and to keep options open for the future. Shaping land use patterns will be critical for this. Urban populations will swell by hundreds of millions this century, and it would be better if settlements expanded away from the coastal lowlands and floodplains most exposed to risk. To conserve biodiversity, plants and animals will need to be able to migrate upslope and polewards to cooler ground, and it would be better if their escape routes are not blocked by swathes of intensive agriculture.

Avoiding these undesirable outcomes is doubly difficult – first, because it is hard for political systems to exercise such foresight, and second because past experience with land use planning and zoning is not encouraging.

A review of World Bank activities found that the Bank and its clients indeed focused much more on here-and-now climate variability adaptation than on anticipatory adaptation. But there are exceptions. The South African Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development Project helped the Western Cape Province develop a sophisticated approach to long-term spatial development planning in order to maintain the region’s rich and globally distinctive floral biodiversity. A technical assistance project in the Indian Sundarbans– a low-lying delta facing the Bay of Bengal -- outlined a generation-long plan to reconfigure development patterns threatened by the rising sea.

Findings and Recommendations

FINDINGS

RECOMMENDATIONS

Guidance is lacking on when and how to incorporate climate risks into project design and appraisal.

Current procedures are ad hoc. Climate risks are sometimes neglected. At the other extreme, climate projections based on complex global models have not been useful for many project-level applications.

Develop reference guidelines for incorporating climate risk management into project and program design, appraisal, and implementation.These guidelines are not meant to be rigidly prescriptive but rather to provide guidance on appropriate levels of due diligence for activities of different size, flexibility and longevity, The guidelines, tailored to project types or sectors, would include relevant risks to be assessed; guidance on available risk assessment tools including their strengths, limitations, and applicability; and options for integrating climate risk considerations into design and implementation.  The World Bank Group could use its convening power to assemble climate scientists and industry experts to draft these guidelines, creating a network that would deepen and refine the guidelines over time and might help disseminate them to other interested groups.

Current results frameworks on resilience are not outcome-oriented and risk emphasizing spending over results.It is not possible to meaningfully measure spending on adaptation.

Develop and pilot territorial and national-level measures of adaptation-related outcomes and impacts for inclusion in an improved results framework.  These could include better measures of institutional capability, household measures of vulnerability and exposure, and biophysical measures such as water consumption.

Costs and impacts of presumed adaptation-oriented activities are not well understood.

Pilot approaches to better assess the costs, benefits, sustainability, and impact of activities with presumed resilience benefits. 
(Click here for examples of issues where information is needed to better guide development choices.)

An inspirational example is the Bank-financed Sujala Project in Karnataka, India,which had an exemplary monitoring and evaluation system, conducted by the Indian Space Research Organization. The project used rapid feedback on results to improve targeting of antipoverty efforts on women and landless people. It rigorously documented income gains and environmental improvements, leading to widespread scale up of the project’s approach.

Hydromet systems potentially offer important benefits, but are poorly maintained in many countries especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Support countries to improve quality and use of hydromet services and encourage the sharing of hydromet information within and between countries.

Anticipatory actions, including spatial planning, are critical for some aspects of long run climate change adaptation.

Promote attention to anticipatory adaptation to long-run climate change. Integrate long run spatial development concerns into development planning for coastal cities, estuaries, and floodplain, and into national biodiversity plans.

National adaptation plans have spread themselves too thin across too many topics and locations.

Although adaptation involves cross sectoral issues, countries and regions with limited capacity should take a focused approach, tackling a priority issue, and integrating planning with implementation.