Promoting Integrated Climate Approaches in South Asia - SAR-CLIMATE

Promoting Integrated Climate Approaches in South Asia

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Divided by geographic boundaries, over 1.9 billion people living in South Asian countries share mountains, rivers, oceans, energy sources as well as weather and vulnerabilities associated with climate change. Therefore, cooperation across borders is critical to meeting the challenges unleashed by the vagaries of weather.

The development gains in South Asia are already in peril due to the increasing frequency and intensity of floods, cold and heat waves, droughts, wind storms, and cyclones. Approximately 17.5 million people across South Asia have been affected by monsoon flooding in 2020 amid the COVID-19 health crisis.

The World Bank estimated that the region has lost US$127 billion in damages to 1,000 climate-induced disasters between 1990 and 2019.”Adaptation is the only effective option to manage the inevitable impacts of climate change that mitigation cannot reduce,” an analysis of South Asia specific findings from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) argues. The IPCC describes adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects”.

South Asian countries have been making great strides in developing climate change policies, national adaptation plans, nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, leveraging innovative solutions, and exploring climate financing. Bangladesh, for example, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), is spending US$1 billion per year for climate change adaptation, which is around 6-7% of its annual budget.

However, the adaptation finance gap, as well as the lack of coherent policies, robust institutional setup, and limited opportunities for exchanging regional data, are some of the key challenges South Asian countries face to becoming resilient to climate change. In addition, the region’s dependency on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, water, natural resources, and environmental security requires regional collaboration to accelerate sector-specific adaptation to changing climate.

Given the geo-political situation of the region, an enabling environment needs to be created to foster cooperation and knowledge-sharing. A regional approach to reduce climate change impacts allows for a common baseline of data, information, and knowledge from which country-specific resilience and adaptation policies can be developed.

In response to these challenges, Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) has initiated the implementation of a World Bank-funded project, “Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CARE) for South Asia”. The project will support regional collaboration, introduce innovative solutions, and foster the knowledge and technology required to scale up climate adaptation action, policies, and investments in agriculture, water resources management and road infrastructure.

Facilitating cooperation between South Asian countries is expected to reduce the transboundary impacts of climate change and to pool resources to meet common challenges.

The CARE for South Asia project aims to create an enabling environment for climate resilience by improving the availability of regional data and knowledge, developing guidelines, tools, and capacities, and promoting climate-resilient decisions, policies, and investments across key sectors.

The initiative is expected to improve the technical capacities of institutions in Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan and provide support to policy and investment interventions, climate-risk management solutions, and national-level sectoral Decision Support Systems (DSS) for climate resilience.

The project recognizes the need for an effective adaptation planning across key sectors─ climate-smart agriculture, integrated water resources management, road infrastructure, and climate finance and planning including finance and planning for climate-informed macro-level analysis, modeling, and climate-informed fiscal risk management.

It will also help countries access international climate finance, including support accreditation processes for national/sub-national entities to access the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

In addition, the CARE for South Asia project will promote innovation and adoption of disruptive technology by awarding grants to eligible and qualifying innovators.

The writer is the Communications Manager at ADPC.

Email: nusrat.rana@adpc.net

About Post Author

paul

paul@abu.org.my

http://wpx2.abu.org.my/

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