By Pınar Yardımcı
Adaptation to climate change has firmly entered the vocabulary of global development policy. From the Paris Agreement to the Sustainable Development Goals, international frameworks increasingly recognise that the most vulnerable countries need dedicated financial support to cope with a crisis they did not create. The rhetoric is unambiguous: adaptation is urgent, non-negotiable, and overdue.
Continue reading “Why Development Economics Should Claim Adaptation Finance”
By Elise Remling
Societies—particularly the poorest—are not ready to deal with the worsening impacts of climate change, and the deficit is growing, according to the latest report from the IPCC. We urgently need to step up investment in climate adaptation interventions, which aim to adjust social systems and structures to reduce their vulnerability to climate change.
However, in doing so we also need to recognize that interventions that make one community or area more resilient can make others even more vulnerable and insecure, and in some cases increase the risks of conflict. Researchers still often neglect such ‘maladaptive’ outcomes; practitioners even more so. How can organizations working on adaptation in fragile and conflict-affected situations make sure their interventions not only do no harm, but even contribute to peace?
Continue reading “Five rules for climate adaptation in fragile and conflict-affected situations”
By Siri Eriksen, Marianne Mosberg, Benard Muok, Katharine Vincent, Lisa Schipper, Morgan Scoville-Simonds
Climate change requires rethinking development. Yet, in the (understandable) rush to support adaptation, this has taken place within the structures and process of existing development paradigms. As a consequence, similar to well-known critiques of the development architecture, many adaptation-interventions reproduce both the development problems and the skewed power relations that have contributed to vulnerability in the first place. Continue reading “Why Does Climate Adaptation End Up Repeating, Rather Than Rethinking, Old Development Mistakes?”
