Climate change threatens to undo any progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, with the world’s poorest people suffering the most from its impacts. Development agencies already advocate for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but they must also adopt a new role, focusing on helping people to adapt to climate change.

Adaptation is the ability to respond and adjust to the actual or potential impacts of changing climatic conditions. This can be to reduce harmful impacts or to exploit opportunities. Research from Tearfund, a UK-based charity, explains why development agencies (including research institutes and non-governmental organisations) should be concerned with adaptation, what has been done so far, and how they might proceed.

Development agencies are concerned with the wellbeing of poor people. In developing countries, poor people are likely to be the worst affected by climate change. They are also least responsible for causing the problem, as they generally emit the fewest greenhouse gases. This raises questions about fairness, which development agencies should address.

Poor people’s experiences are crucial to informing efforts about how to adapt to climate change, both at national and international levels. The development community is well placed to bring this knowledge to international negotiations, which are currently dominated by politics and the natural sciences.

Development agencies and other institutions already have experience of climate change adaptation in several areas:

• Community-based climate change adaptation: CARE Bangladesh has helped communities in six flood-prone districts to diversify their livelihoods, for example through duck-rearing.
• Health: as part of efforts to promote proactive health services, the University of Nairobi in Kenya has developed an early warning system for malaria, based on climatic conditions.
• Water and sanitation: adapting the management of water resources will be essential. In Niger, Jemed (a local non-governmental organisation) has been working with the semi-nomadic Tuareg people, helping communities to establish ‘fixation points’ (such as wells) and conserve rainwater through low dykes.
• Agriculture and food insecurity: the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia is implementing ‘conservation farming’ with communities to deal with changing rainfall patterns.
• Disaster risk reduction: The Vietnam Red Cross has helped to protect coastal communities threatened by typhoons through cultivating mangrove plantations, which not only provide storm protection but also create a source of seafood farming.

Adaptation efforts such as these are currently fragmented and not always consciously seen as adaptation to climate change. They need to be brought together and built upon so people can learn from each other’s experiences.

Development agencies should:

• raise awareness among partner organisations about adaptation
• make all their programmes more responsive to climate change impacts
• plan their adaptation activities carefully to ensure that they are consistent with poverty reduction policies, plans and programmes
• engage with international climate change debates and continue to advocate for government action on climate change and adaptation
• build links with researchers to help create and refine new approaches to adaptation.

Source(s):
‘Adapting to Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities for the Development Community’, Tearfund Discussion Paper, Tearfund: Teddington, by Tom Mitchell and Thomas Tanner, 2006 (PDF) Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 11 July 2007

Further Information:
Tom Mitchell
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton, BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1273 877529
Fax: +44 (0)1273 877305
Contact the contributor: t.mitchell@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies, UK

Rachael Roach
Tearfund
100 Church Road, Teddington
Middlesex, TW11 8QE
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 89779144
Fax: +44 (0)20 89773594
Contact the contributor: ppadmin@tearfund.org

Tearfund, UK

Other related links:
'The challenge of adapting to climate change in developing countries'

'Climate change in Tanzania – addressing vulnerable groups in adaptation planning'

'Adapting to climate change – how do poor people cope?'

id21 insights 53 'Securing development in the face of climate change'