Climate Change Adaptation and Poverty Reduction: Key interactions and critical measures

A review of agency reports shows that there are several institutional barriers to mainstreaming climate change adaptation into poverty reduction efforts. Current attention to climate change in development agencies, development policies, projects and programmes is low. A link to poverty reduction is also missing: where mentioned, climate change is mainly framed as a question of mitigation and largely as an environmental issue, not as a development concern.
Risk reduction, for example in the form of improving early warning and evacuation procedures during drought, has formed the focus of adaptation efforts of development agencies such as Danida and GTZ. The current formal institutions for climate policy, which have been designed for mitigation, appear to have hindered rather than facilitated a broader mainstreaming of adaptation.

The fact that adaptation has been mainly seen as an environmental issue is one of the main institutional barriers to mainstreaming within development agencies. Adaptation has been treated as an extension of mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. As a consequence of this, most agency personnel do not think of climate change as a development issue. Both in donor and recipient countries environment ministers, rather than finance and planning ministers have ownership of the climate change issue. Norad illustrates a fairly typical pattern in ODA where all climate change activities are carried out by an environment team.
Such an institutional placement of climate change further hinders its mainstreaming since environment in itself is often not a priority with development agencies.
In addition, ODA agencies often focus on a few sectors per recipient country, and countries in which environment is not a focus sector therefore do not receive support for climate change measures.

Strengthening the adaption focus
There are several opportunities for strengthening the adaptation focus in ODA. High level buy-in and political prioritisation of environment and climate in integrating it into ODA is important. The awareness of climate change is rising within several development agencies, such as DFID and GTZ. Within Norwegian development cooperation, personnel working on PRSPs are an entry point to integrating adaptation in development, requiring basic and non-complex information on adaptation. Reaching colleagues who are not climate change experts is a first step as this enables them to refer further work to experts where necessary.

Background
The material presented here forms part of a study led by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project (GECHS) in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo and carried out in collaboration with Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany; the Center for International Climate and Environment Research - Oslo, Oslo, Norway; the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Geneva, Switzerland; Intercooperation, Berne, Switzerland and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, Dübendorf, Switzerland.
An earlier draft of the report was presented and discussed at the GECHS/Norad workshop on Climate Change and Poverty, Oslo, 9-10 January 2006.

Published as GECHS Report 2007:1.