Workshop 2 Concept noteClimate adaptation, slow onset disasters and disaster risk reduction

ProVention Consortium Forum 2007

MakingDisaster Risk Reduction Work

Dar es Salaam, February 13-15 2007

Workshop 2Concept Note

Climate adaptation, slow onset disasters and disaster risk reduction

Concept note to stimulate discussion[1]

This workshop discusses the challenge of dealing with creeping disasters triggered by climate-related phenomena. The first, droughts, typically unfold on a timescale of months to years. The second, climate change, materializes over a longer period of time, but is expected to affect the spatial distribution, frequency and intensity of a range of hydro-meteorological hazards including rapid-onset hazards such as cyclones, floods, and landslides as well as slow onset hazards such as droughts. Climate change, other environmental changes, and socio-economic change, also affect the cross-cutting background conditions from which disaster risks and disasters materialize.

Session 1: Slow onset disasters

A recent review of drought-disaster losses recorded in the EM-DAT database ( showed that over half of all deaths associated with natural hazards in EM-DAT are now classified as drought-related and only floods rank higher in terms of the number of people affected. The vast majority of drought disasters occur in developing countries. Recurrent drought disasters in developing countries, particularly Africa, combined with concerns about climatic change, continue to make drought an exceptionally important international development issue. Drought prone areas are typically found in the semi-arid tropics, which are characterized by a high degree of dependence on rainfall coupled with a high degree of inter-annual rainfall variabililty.

Drought is a difficult hazard to deal with because it is often spatially extensive and because its health and livelihood impacts are indirect and complex. Drought has one advantage over more rapid-onset disasters, however, in that there is a longer lead time over which to react and, in some regions, predictability through seasonal climate forecasts.

That early warning always has two components. One is the unfolding meteorological and hydrological situation. The other is the underlying vulnerability. Slow-onset disasters are seldom defined by the weather/climate, but particularly through underlying factors such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, and particularly political aspects. Examples abound of severe droughts that pass without major famine (such as Southern Africa in 1991/1992), and on the other hand very severe famines that are only partly caused by failing rains (e.g. Southern Africa 10 years later).

Many of the underlying factors cannot be only addressed by major cross-cutting reform processes, integrating risk reduction into development planning and operations in various sectors and by various actors.

Such planning can be informed by a growing set of support sytems, including early warning based on climate projections and seasonal forecasting, hazard and vulnerability mapping, livelihoods assessments, water resource management.

The workshop will aim to identify key challenges and opportunities in better managing slow onset hazard risks. In doing so, a cross-cutting question is how drought vulnerability and food insecurity relate to the overall disaster risk reduction debate.

Should drought (and drought risk management) be integrated in the broad disaster risk reduction agenda, or treated as a separate hazard type with a distinct set of causal and impact factors?

Session 2: Climate change

A similar question could be asked about climate change, a topic that has primarily been debated in a community that historically had few linkages with the disaster risk reduction community.

As confirmed by the new IPCC report, anthropogenic climate change is already happening, and is bound to continue, even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios. Around the world, weather patterns are changing; temperatures are rising and glaciers and snow caps are melting. Animals and plants are changing their ranges, behavior, and even morphology. Recent studies suggest that the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes has markedly increased in recent decades over historical levels. The IPCC report suggests that droughts, heavyprecipitation, and heat waves will become more prevalent, and that interannual variability will increase in some regions. . Such changes – current or predicted -- can have major impacts on the economic performance of developing countries, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, and eventually on the achievement and sustainability of the MDGs.

Given that many impacts of climate change will materialize through extreme weather events and climate variability, climate change increase the urgency of disaster risk reduction. But beyond “doing more of what we already know needs to be done”, climate change adds another dimension. While vulnerability to natural hazards is constantly changing, the probability of the hazards is often taken as a given. In the case of climate change however, we do know that the hazards themselves are changing.

This adds another level of complexity to the challenge of better disaster risk reduction. There is substantial evidence that disaster risk reduction, at all levels, does yield good returns. But it remains difficult to convince stakeholders to invest human and financial resources, and sometimes political capital to avoid something that may happen, a much less rewarding perspective than to invest in something that will yield immediate benefits. In the case of developing countries, the situation may be aggravated by the perspective of generous financial assistance after the fact, while there is much less grant funding available for disaster risk reduction.

An emerging paradigm for confronting these dilemmas and uniting work across climatic time-scales, is climate risk management. A climate risk management approach seeks to maintain and improve society's ability to achieve socio-economic and development goals in the face of climate variability superimposed on a changing climatic background. It focuses on climate-related development outcomes – in areas such as agriculture, water resources, food security, health, the environment and livelihoods – that are sensitive to both climate variability and change.

Risk management is well-established in other circles, with innovations being instituted over decades in climate sensitive sectors such as agriculture and energy as well as in the international financial and investment system in general. With the prospect of climate change, perhaps accompanied by growing societal exposure and vulnerability, to what extent can these risk management principles be applied more systematically to mange climate-related risks and achieve better economic and social outcomes, particularly in poor countries that are not well-served by market-based mechanisms?

With this approach, uncertainty concerning long term climatic futures, rather than leading to policy paralysis, instead becomes an added incentive for action. The rising risks can also act as a trigger to jumpstart efforts to better manage risks on all timescales. In addition, new funding for climate change adaptation may help to provide a carrot for disaster risk reduction. Creating that momentum for comprehensive climate risk reduction, and using it effectively, depends on a good interplay between evidence on the ongoing changes and their impacts on disaster risk, and a good diagnosis of how the underlying problems might best be tackled.

Key messages on implementing climate risk reduction include the following:

-Climate change needs to be treated as a major economic and social riskto national economies, not just as a long-term environmental problem.

-Addressing short-term vulnerabilities is the best strategy for preparing for long-term impacts. From this perspective, adaptation and disaster risk reduction clearly need to be integrated efforts—climate risk management.

-Climate risk management requires a continuous dialogue between a wide set of actors – policy makers, practitioners in various sectors and at various levels, and providers of climate information.

-Within governments, climate risk management needs to be fully integrated into economic planning and the preparation of sectoral plans and budgets. It also requires high-level coordination, since it cuts across major sectors of the economy.

-Much of the climate risk management effort will have to be undertaken by communities and the private sector. These actors therefore need to be involved in the planning and implementation of adaptation.

-Community-based risk reduction can be very effective. To have an impact at macro level, a key challenge is to go beyond a few pilot locations, and achieve substantial coverage. A key element is to establish good feedback mechanisms from communities to the appropriate agencies to generate a supportive enabling environment (outreach, legislation and regulations, as well as specific support). This requires specific institutional attention.

-Adaptation investments need to be informed by a long-term process that links bottom-up consultation with top-down planning and policy. This approach should allow key implementers (communities, the private sector, etc.) to have a say in government planning and should in turn enable the government to hold these actors accountable for effective implementation.

-Many adaptation investments involve strengthening or enforcing existing regulations and therefore require full buy-in from regulatory agencies.

-No-regrets strategies and “soft” solutions embedded in more sustainable natural resources management should be pursued where they are available. Given the remaining uncertainties in climate projections, particularly for extreme weather events and at the local scale, adaptation should primarily look at policy changes to reduce vulnerability and at “soft” technologies rather than site-specific structural protection measures, unless they cost-effectively address current hazards.

-Weather index insurance and other financial risk management innovations show promise for introducing risk transfer opportunities into climate-sensitive areas. Although these measures are sometimes in experimental stages, they have demonstrated exciting possibilities that can be further explored.

As in the first part of the session dealing with slow onset disasters, a question for discussion is how the disaster risk reduction community should engage on climate change. There are many technical and strategic reasons to foster closer collaboration and exchange of knowledge between the disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation communities. What are the main opportunities and priorities, and what are potential pitfalls?

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[1] Prepared by Maarten van Aalst and Maxx Dilley