Adaptation and Climate Vulnerability Project – UNEP

There is growing evidence that global climate is changing and will continue to do so with profound effects on people’s wellbeing. Climate change is likely to cause more general future changes in temperature, precipitations and other parameters as well as changed variability and more extreme events including increased frequency of floods, droughts, and storm surges, rise in sea level as well as other events.

These changes may potentially cause economic and human losses and have various impacts on sustainable development opportunities. Hence, assessment of risks and possible impacts from projected changes of the global climate becomes increasingly important in national planning.

The objective of the Adaptation and Climate Vulnerability Project is to elaborate a methodology for mainstreaming climate analysis into sustainable development programmes and to test the methodology in selected countries, including Tanzania, India and Peru. Work in the area of mainstreaming climate activities in development planning has been initiated by others, i.e. the World Bank and the Interagency Initiative on Climate Change and the Vulnerability of the Poor. However, the methodological guidelines on how to incorporate climate events into sustainable development planning are still very general.

The Adaptation and Climate Vulnerability Project aims to provide simple but effective steps by which national activities, such as land use planning, energy policies, transportation, health, disaster management and others, can be designed to take account of future climate risk. The assessment of risks, how to evaluate different options for mitigating the risks and steps to implement the measures are the main components of the project work. The methodology will be applied on the country level to test it in relation to different cases.

Main outputs of the project are a Methodological framework for mainstreaming of climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessments, country case studies based on the methodological framework and a project workshop with representatives of all partners. A final project report will include the methodology and the case studies.

The Project is managed by the UNEP Risø Centre (URC) with Sustainable Development and Climate Change Coordinator Dr. Kirsten Halsnæs as the project leader. FEEM is responsible for collaborating with URC about the methodological work and for supporting the country study work in Tanzania (shared with URC) and in Peru.