Thank you for your interest in our recent E Co. institute Adaptation training webinar, ‘Linking local adaptation to national, sectoral, and project levels’. Welcome to your replay kit.
On Tuesday 20 June, we held an insightful adaptation training session moderated by Consultant, Marcus Arcanjo, and featuring Senior consultants, William Lynam and Dr Irina Hauler, and E Co. Founder, Dr Grant Ballard-Tremeer. In this session, the team explored how project developers can best link local adaptation needs and considerations to the national, sectoral, and project levels.
Our expert consultants determined how to integrate climate adaptation at the local level in the first place, providing practitioners several best practices to utilise in their own work. This session included a dedicated Q&A session where registrants can ask any questions they may have
This adaptation training replay kit includes valuable information and a full recording of the webinar as it happened.
- Watch the full webinar session here
- Ask our consultants: Questions on Adaptation
- Access the training materials
- Training and updates from E Co. institute
Watch our E Co. institute adaptation training webinar here
Answering your adaptation training questions
1. Some developing countries have adopted a programmatic rather than a sectoral approach to development planning. How should the local adaptation link be addressed in such situations?
The programmatic approach can facilitate interactions with the funding agencies at a more strategic level and increase co-financing opportunities from national and local government bodies and a variety of other sources, including donors and the private sector. In addition, the approach helps countries push for sector-wide transformation and addresses barriers to moving economic sectors onto a sustainable ecological and socioeconomic path.
This is done in a strategic and coordinated manner by helping integrate horizontal and vertical global environmental concerns into decision making. A programmatic approach can provide a convening power for achieving better coordination and synergies among the regional, national, and local initiatives already underway in the recipient country. The programme will also play an important role in bridging the current gaps between strong political will and commitment—and institutional weakness and lack of stakeholder participation in on-the-ground implementation, thus benefiting locally-led adaptation.
2. ‘Local adaptation planning’ can be seen as being funded by government or the bi/multilaterals. But when it comes to implementation, no action on the ground is seen. Why are the ‘plans’ preferred over ‘implementation’ by governments or multilaterals?
Plans are important. You need to make sure you are reducing the risk of maladaptation as much as possible and that you have buy-in from both government and community-level. Plans are evidently needed before the implementation, but more does need to happen in terms of implementation.
There is often a disconnect between national policies and local actions. Governments at the national and local level don’t often speak to each other, and often local governments lack the capacity for implementation. While national policies and plans can be in place, it is largely to do with governance issues that we see weak implementation.
There is also the potential that the whole process for creating these plans is wrong. They’re started top-down, and then those plans get put on the shelf. At that point, a list of priority projects is often drafted, which creates criteria through which a project is judged, effectively limiting how many will actually be fulfilled. What is missing is the ‘locally-led’ – so either utilising community-led projects driven by those it is providing benefits too, or locally-led in terms of local governance.
3. In terms of data gaps to present a strong climate rationale, what would be your suggestion to go about it? Some funders require to present a strong climate case in the proposal.
Data availability is a rather complex issue. Robust data is vital for producing a strong climate rationale. However, this data are not always, or even often, available. How can we address these gaps? When developing concept notes, it is important to obtain as much secondary data as possible, both from desktop research but also from direct engagements with the stakeholders who could provide you with unpublished/not publicly available data. If there are still gaps remaining, it is important to highlight these in the climate rationale and attempt to fill these in during the funding proposal stage. This might involve collection of some primary data including farmer or technical surveys.
There is a new Data Gaps Initiative which encourages G20 economies to go beyond gross domestic product in their national statistics, by capturing a suite of climate indicators and distributional estimates of household income and wealth. This will hopefully expand to include many more countries thus generating essential climate change data at the global level.
4. How do we create momentum for climate adaptation to engage and create systemic alliances and partnerships cross sectors and cross organisations?
The gravity of the adaptation challenge makes it a whole-government and whole-society endeavour. It is vital for the private and public sectors to work together more closely, in particular on financing adaptation. Multiple alliances could be forged, including an alliance to support the private sector to identify risks and steer investment towards action on adaptation and resilience (and avoid maladaptation), alliances between countries focused on making adaptation smarter, more systemic, swifter, and by stepping up international action. This will translate throughout the policy cycle into improved knowledge and data, support to policy development and climate risk management at all levels, and accelerate adaptation action across the board. An important alliance would be one on climate change data and knowledge sharing between governments and organisations across all sectors.
There is increasing demand to translate the wealth of climate information available into customised, user-friendly tools. We need to push the frontiers of adaptation knowledge, and acquire more and better climate-related data, notably on economic losses. And we need to bring it all together. There is already a robust knowledge base for action but further work is needed on adaptation, its costs, benefits, and distributional effects. In addition, we must draw on science to improve our understanding of the nexus between climate hazards and socioeconomic vulnerabilities and inequalities. We must also develop effective and inclusive governance mechanisms that ensure dialogue between policymakers and scientists.
5. You’ve made a compelling argument for the need for local adaptation since that is where the impacts are most acutely felt. To what extent should we have locally-led adaptation, in your view? Are there advantages or disadvantages to this?
As we mentioned in the webinar, adaptation is a local issue and hence, it should be locally-led, where possible. A bottom-up approach is always preferable when designing adaptation solutions to local problems. The main advantage to this would be the fact that the adaptation solutions will be developed through discussions with the people who need to adapt, for example, smallholder farmers.
This bottom-up development approach would mean that the solutions would be more targeted, relevant and beneficial to the population in the long term. A disadvantage to being solely locally-led is that the local communities will still need inputs from the key regional and national stakeholders, in terms of technical expertise, financial inputs, capacity building, and knowledge sharing etc. Hence, whilst adaptation should be locally-led, it should necessarily include a variety of stakeholders to be truly successful.
6. Why is it difficult for adaptation funding – do we lack new Technologies or do we need nature-based solutions to make it easier for the funding with collaboration and policies
Our view is that it is not so much about the solutions but about the risks related to funding. There are large risks within current funding systems, alongside a large gap in funding and access to funding specifically in climate adaptation. Less than 50% of funds promised by developed nations are being made available to developing countries over an annual basis, and that is a major risk in terms of how easily and quickly they can adapt to climate change.
Also, the costs of adaptation measures can often be higher than perhaps originally perceived due to the long-term nature of climate change effects and involved risks. Furthermore, in the vast majority of Adaptation projects, these are not revenue generators. While there is an economic benefit overall, and an avoided future cost, there’s not an immediate revenue. There is usually a need for projects to have a quick return on investment.
7. Is there a funding gap or lack of properly designed (bankable) projects able to absorb the funding?
It is a mixture of both. However, the focus, until recently, has been predominantly on mitigation, as this has been historically perceived as more important than adaptation. In recent years, we’ve seen this change, so hopefully the money will follow as more and more people see that we’re having to deal with the climate change that is already happening.
However, this is not to say that adaptation finance is receiving the funding needed. There’s still a long way to go, with only a small percentage of global climate finance going towards adaptation. So while funding bodies such as the GCF are trying to reach parity, we’re still seeing a lot less money going towards adaptation.
For more information on the gap in adaptation finance, head to this article.
8. Can you highlight the barriers that prevent that ideal situation of linking local to national level from being a reality? And any suggestions for overcoming them?
The main barrier is that, while there are national policy frameworks, there are no higher resolution local plans for adaptation in the majority of countries, so countries need both of these things to reach both central planning and local priorities and then connect higher level mobilisation of resources for adaptation. This will then channel those resources into the hands of those who need them.
There is also the need to recognise that local climate change responses may contribute to improved governance as well as poverty co-benefits, so it’s important that projects and policies are often planned bottom-up. We can also explore opportunities for integrating adaptation planning at local levels and invest in and support governance reform to achieve the intended outcomes. Finally, we need to continuously monitor and learn from past mistakes and utilise lessons learned.
Access the E Co. institute adaptation training materials
For this training session, Dr Irina Hauler and William Lynam utilised a presentation laden with key information that you can utilise in your own work. We’ve made sure that you can access this presentation in this replay kit.
Download the presentation here.
Training and updates from E Co. institute
E Co. institute is the training division of E Co. and is run by our project formulation experts. E Co. institute builds on our experience developing low-carbon, climate-resilient projects & programmes and the specialist training workshops we’ve conducted across the globe. Our trainings, coaching, and courses are intended for mid-level professionals working in UN agencies, NGOs, bilateral organisations, development banks, and local or country government officials. For more information, see here for how we can help you and your team.
- If you’re interested in learning more about E Co. institute‘s bespoke training services for you and your team, you can email Dr Grant Ballard-Tremeer at: grant@ecoltdgroup.com and we’ll be happy to arrange a 30-minute call with our consultants to discuss this further.
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About these resources
These adaptation training resources are an initiative of E Co., emerging from work we are doing to develop low-carbon, climate-resilient projects. E Co. has produced the resources independently.