CGE Training Materials for Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment
Chapter 9: Integration, Mainstreaming, Monitoring and Evaluation
Contents
9.1 Introduction 1
9.2 Integration 1
9.2.1 Integrating VULNERABILITY Assessment Outcomes 2
9.2.2 Integrating Adaptation Outcomes 9
9.2.3 Cost Benefit Analysis 11
9.3 Mainstreaming 12
9.4 Monitoring and Evaluation 16
9.5 Concluding Thoughts 21
9.6 References 23
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Chapter 9: Integration, Mainstreaming, Monitoring and Evaluation
9.1 Introduction
This chapter consists of three interrelated components:
· Integration;
· Mainstreaming;
· Monitoring and evaluation.
Integration, in this context, refers to the analysis of vulnerability and adaptation (V&A) assessment outcomes across sectors. The aim of integration is to understand the interrelationships between sector-specific climate change and the relative importance of risks to help inform impact and adaptation priorities. Mainstreaming focuses on tools and approaches to incorporate V&A assessment outcomes in national planning – thus ensuring that climate change is considered in development priorities. Finally, monitoring and evaluation is concerned with the process of review and reporting on adaptation implementation and using this process to improve adaptive decision-making.
9.2 Integration
As chapters 5–8 have clearly demonstrated, climate change impacts do not happen in isolation from each other. What happens in one sector, or region, can affect other sectors or regions. Indeed, impacts that are the result of a climate impact on another sector, region or population can be as important as the direct effects of climate change. For example, as clearly demonstrated in chapter 6, irrigated agriculture could be more sensitive to reduced deliveries of water for irrigation if climate change resulted in a decline in run-off than to the effect of higher temperatures on crop yields.
It is important for policy makers and other stakeholders to understand how a sector, community, region or nation could be affected in total by climate change, and what the total impact may be. This can be useful to understand the severity of climate change, to set policy goals for adaptation and mitigation, and to understand how climate change could affect sustainable development (e.g. meeting Millennium Development Goals). In addition, it may be important to know how different sectors, regions or populations compare in terms of relative vulnerability to help set priorities for adaptation that can guide the allocation of adaptation financing appropriately.
Approaches to integration are discussed separately for (i) impacts and (ii) adaptation.
9.2.1 Integrating VULNERABILITY Assessment Outcomes
In broad terms, the outcomes of vulnerability assessment undertaken in different sectors, such as health, water and agriculture can be integrated in two ways:
(i) Cross-sectoral;
(ii) Multi-sectoral integration.
Cross-sectoral integration involves integrating impacts across related sectors. These are sectors that can be directly affected by climate change and by climate change impacts in other sectors. Cross-sectoral integration involves examining a small number of sectors that are strongly interrelated, such as water and health. For example, human health can be affected by changes in water resource management. Similarly, human health can be affected by decreases in food security, as a result of declines in agricultural production. Chapter 8 provides further information on the linkages between the implications of climate change on human health and their relationships with other climate change impacts.
The second type of integration, multi-sector integration, involves combining results across all impacts in all sectors. The objective is to estimate the total effects of climate change or to compare relative impacts and vulnerabilities across sectors. This can involve examining impacts across sectors using a common method to sum, compare or contrast results following sector-specific vulnerability assessments. Alternatively, integrated approaches can be used to inform vulnerability assessments overall, helping to ‘frame’ the approaches used and to ensure that V&A is undertaken in an integrated manner from the beginning.
Cross-Sectoral Integration
In early national communications there was often a strong sectoral assessment component to V&A that resulted in challenges in drawing linkages between sectors. As the understanding of the linkages of climate change vulnerabilities across sectors has increased – for example, the links between agricultural impacts, water and health in rural communities – sectoral assessments (chapters 5–8) are increasingly seeking to address such cross-sectoral issues.
As a result, many recently submitted national communications now mention that some consideration of integration and/or inter-sectoral interactions and dependencies has been undertaken, albeit at a strategic level. For example, the second national communication of Malaysia states:
“Using a sector dependence approach wherein mutual reliance amongst sectors is considered, all sectors are found to be directly dependent on water resources, energy and the public health sectors.”
Consequently, the assessment of cross-sectoral integration has tended to use qualitative methods that involve identifying links between sectors and highlighting the direction of impacts. These rely on application of expert judgement that can be undertaken by the national communications project team, or through an extended process using a broader group of stakeholders. Often, if such broader engagement processes are used there is wider view taken of all sectoral dependencies and interactions – rather than just between one or two sectors – and as such these processes become multi-sectoral analyses (as outlined in the multi-sector integration section).
Quantitative cross-sectoral integration approaches can be used to link the outputs from quantitative impact assessment models from one sector into quantitative impact assessment models from related sectors. In practice, the time, cost and effort required to consider undertaking such quantitative analysis between two sectors stimulates consideration of multiple sectoral interactions. As such, the use of quantitative integration approaches are generally applied to multi-sectoral integration analyses, as shown in the next section.
Multisector Integration
The purpose of multi-sector integration is to help understand how a society as a whole might be affected by climate change. It is intended to help understand the breadth of climate change impacts (e.g. what sectors, regions, populations might be affected) and the potential severity of impacts (e.g. how many people could be harmed, how much might economic output be changed). In addition, multi-sector integration can be applied to determine relative vulnerabilities across sectors. The intention of such integration is to both highlight priorities of specific impacts and also to ensure that the inter-dependence of impacts is explicitly considered.
To be effective, multi-sector integration should be as comprehensive as possible, covering as many affected sectors, regions and populations as possible.
The simplest, and most often used in national communications by non-Annex I Parties, is to use a narrative-based cross-sectoral analysis – or one that ‘tells the story’ of how sectoral impacts are judged to interact, and the implications of such interactions. The great majority of recently submitted national communications use this approach to discuss multi-sectoral dependencies and interactions, and describe how this narrative assessment has helped shape adaptation priorities.
An extension of the qualitative narrative-based multi-sectoral analysis is to use a set of common metrics to provide additional rigour to the assessment. Such ranking approaches can employ a range of qualitative indices through ‘multi-criteria analysis’. This approach has been used by least developed countries (LDCs) in the national adaptation programmes of action (NAPAs)[1] and also by a number of non-Annex I Parties in their national communications.
An example of a simple approach to relative vulnerability ranking is shown in Table 9 - 1 which can be used for ranking current or future vulnerability. The first column of the table lists the sectors of concern, such as coastal resources, water resources, agriculture and human health. For each, current vulnerability can be ranked on a scale from low to high for various categories. Social impacts indicate human vulnerability. The rank assigned indicates the typical climate impact (e.g. the impact of reduced run-off on malnutrition, or how many lives may be lost because of flooding events). Economic vulnerability ranks the magnitude of climate impacts on, for example, agricultural livelihoods and industrial processes. The rank indicates the magnitude of climate impacts (e.g. how changes in water resources have affected sorghum production with subsequent contraction of the workforce, or infrastructure damage due to coastal inundation). Environmental impacts include effects on ecosystems, such as soil erosion and desertification. Other impacts can also be considered (e.g. how drought could affect the ability to meet Millennium Development Goals). The rankings can then be summed to provide a qualitative assessment of vulnerability.
Table 9-1: Ranking vulnerability across multiple sectors
Sector / Social impacts / Economic impacts / Environmental impacts / Otherimpacts / Ranking
Water resources
Coastal Resources
Agriculture
Human Health
This approach to qualitative multiple-sectoral assessment can be used to examine the cross-linkages between sectors. For example, in the V&A assessment of the Bhutan’s second national communication section 4.9 Cross-cutting Issues (p.106), states:
“It is expected that climate change impacts and vulnerabilities will not occur in isolation. Non-climate factors, linkages between sectors, as for instance the link between glaciers and GLOFs and water resources and energy production and the subsequent impacts on agriculture and human health and settlements should also be taken into consideration.”
As a result, Bhutan’s second national communication[2] prepared a matrix to analyse the linkages between the different sectors in this assessment presented in Table 9-2. Importantly, the analysis in Bhutan provided the context for including specific reference to cross-cutting sectors within the sectoral adaptation priorities.
Table 9-2: Bhutan cross-linkages between targeted sectors (Bhutan, second national communication)
The Second national communication for Colombia[3] used an innovative process to explicitly address integrated vulnerability themes (Figure 9-1). Colombia used a broad consensus-building approach within a risk-based framework (see chapter 2) to develop a method to estimate and provide an integrated evaluation of vulnerability “to allow comparisons to be made and assign values for different sectors, ecosystems and institutions in the face of climate change.”
To do this, Columbia used the outputs of climate change models (see chapter 4) to develop sensitivity index (ISA) to the relative affectation index (IRA) that was:
“… based on the discussion and consensus of more than 80 professionals in different sectors and specialties; the intention was to introduce priorities with using the judgement of experts to identify each of the coverage, ecosystems or territories which might suffer impact from adverse events in climate change in the worst scenario.” (Second national communication for Colombia, Executive Summary p.57)
Figure 9-1: Integrated multi-sectoral vulnerability assessment process used in the Colombia second national communication
The most complex form of multi-sectoral analysis is to undertake integrated assessment of economic impacts as the common ‘currency’ across sectors and areas, using benefit/cost approaches. For example, under the World Bank Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change (EACC)[4] programme, seven country-level assessments (Mozambique, Ghana, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bolivia and Samoa) were undertaken in parallel to a global-level economic analysis.
For Samoa, EACC applied records of past economic loss due to natural disasters to develop a macro-economic model of the interactions between climate and the economy. The estimated costs of impact without adaptation and with adaptation were compared. In addition, the study applied a cost-benefit test to assess the appropriate timing of adaptation projects identified in Samoa’s NAPA (World Bank, 2010b). Such data and modelling intensive approaches are valuable in communicating the need for adaptation and can inform policy design.
In the Ethiopian EACC project, an economy-wide modelling exercise was undertaken which linked a dynamic multi-sectoral and multi-regional computable general equilibrium model (CGE) with a range of sectoral climate change impact models that generate quantitative estimates of effects on water systems, agriculture, hydro-energy and road transport infrastructure (World Bank 2010a) (Figure 9-2).
Figure 9-2 Flow chart of model sequencing (World Bank, 2010a)
The use of integrated economic assessments is an emerging approach within non-Annex I Parties, given both the technical capacities required, the data requirements and also the treatment of ‘non-market’ values, such as ecosystem services and social/cultural values. There is clearly a trend towards the use of such models, and it is likely that specific training and capacity-building activities will take place in coming years.
9.2.2 Integrating Adaptation Outcomes
The exercise of setting priorities across vulnerabilities, as outlined in the previous section, can be particularly useful for identifying which adaptation options are considered of highest priority and which adaptive actions can be considered as addressing ‘key’ vulnerabilities. There are a variety of approaches to assist in setting priorities among adaptation measures, including:
· Screening tools;
· Multi-criteria assessment;
· Benefit-cost analysis.
These tools can be used either as extensions of the same (or similar) approaches used in helping to consider the multi-sectoral integration of vulnerability assessments, or as stand alone adaptation assessments. Ideally, the choice of tool to help prioritize adaptation actions (by either absolute priority or the urgency of implementation) will link to tools used for assessing relative vulnerabilities.
Adaptation actions can be organized by sector, vulnerability or region, depending on decision-making preferences. Evaluating and ranking adaptation options can be useful for setting priorities for domestic action.
There is no right or wrong way to evaluate adaptation options and set priorities. However, involvement of stakeholders is critical because any ranking of adaptation options will involve value judgements. Importantly, LDC Parties that have prepared NAPAs (and in the future national adaptation plans (NAPs) may build on the information contained in these documents to prepare subsequent national communications.
Screening analysis
One simple method is the screening analysis. It involves answering yes/no questions about adaptation options. Those options with the most yes’s can either be given the highest priority or be subject to more rigorous analysis, such as multi-criteria assessment or benefit–cost analysis. The matrix prepared by Antigua and Barbuda (Table 9-3) as part of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Country Studies Program is an example of application of a screening analysis.
Table 9-3: Screening matrix used in Antigua and Barbuda (Mizina et al., 1999)
(Note: Italics indicate adaptation measures that ranked highest)
High priority means that adaptation needs to be addressed now, or soon, rather than delayed. A target of opportunity is a decision that is being made now to address other issues that are sensitive to climate, and should consider climate change. The other categories are self-explanatory.