Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme (NCAP)

• 1 Overview
• 2 The Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme
• 3 Country projects:
• 4 Lessons Learned

Overview

The question of whether climate change will happen has been replaced with even more sobering questions: how great will the change be, and how severe its impacts? The situation is grave, and yet these are ultimately anthropogenic problems, to which there exist and are emerging anthropogenic solutions. The challenge lies in their timely realization through processes such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and capacity strengthening opportunities such as the Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme (NCAP).

Likely climate change impacts during this time include significant shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns leading to greater humidity in some areas and aridity in others, high sea level rise in certain regions, and increases in the occurrence and severity of extreme events such as storms, drought and flooding. Adaptation to these adverse impacts of climate change has therefore become a priority.

In an ironic twist, the countries least responsible for climate change (the developing countries) are largely those most exposed to its impacts. The irony bites deeper still in that climate change is likely to have the greatest impact on the poorest people within those countries - those already exposed to an array of potential shocks and least able to recover in the aftermath.

Developing countries have a particular position within the international climate negotiations as parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Under the UNFCCC they are obliged to produce National Communications and an action plan for the implementation of the convention. The raison d'etre of the NCAP is the shortfall in many developing countries to implement these requirements. These countries often require external technical and/or financial assistance to reach a qualitatively good preparation, formulation, implementation and evaluation of national climate policy. NCAP has been created to address this problem by assisting a number of developing countries to become self-supporting in formulating climate policy.

The Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme

The first phase of the Netherlands Climate Change Studies Assistance Programme (NCCSAP) began in 1996, and is an important example of Netherlands bilateral cooperation. During the first phase, NCCSAP supported a group of 13 non-Annex 1 countries to enhance their capacity to formulate and implement climate change national policies to fulfil their commitments to UNFCCC. NCCSAP assisted in preparing national reports, in comparing national situations in different contexts, and contributed to an overall learning process by all concerned parties, including The Netherlands.

The key thematic lesson from the first phase of the NCCSAP is that vulnerability and adaptation analysis cannot be driven solely by climate change modelling. Livelihood vulnerability must be given at least as much emphasis as biophysical vulnerability, not least because they are interdependent.

The second phase of the NCCSAP began in March 2003 (re-named NCAP in 2005), including eight countries involved in the first phase and six further countries: Bhutan, Bolivia, Colombia, Ghana, Yemen, Suriname, Mali, Mongolia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Mozambique, Tanzania, Vietnam. As in the first phase, the general aim of the second phase is to support these countries in their efforts to prepare, formulate, implement, and evaluate their policy in relation to climate change.

NCAP partners have collaborated effectively with the NCAP technical assistance team, have succeeded in institutionalizing innovative, policy relevant, climate adaptation study projects, have begun to raise awareness in-country beyond the usual circle of climate change experts, and have generated a growing body of useful and high quality written material to synthesize and share the country experiences. Specific objectives, approaches, methodologies and activities carried out under each project were developed by the country partners.

Here are some of the synthesis documents produced by the NCAP partners and technical assistance team. These documents highlight main findings of the country projects and emphasize lessons learned and strategic recommnedations.

Country projects:

As the synthesis reports for each NCAP country come out (see full pdf version in Table below) we will be adding country specific pages to the wiki, which will provide summaries of the methodologies, key findings and lessons learned in each country.

Pages on the different methodologies are collected in the NCAP Methodologies page, the key findings pages are collected together in a page on key findings and the lessons learned are also all available from this page on lessons learned. The different country pages are listed below:

• Bangladesh part of the NCAP project: Study of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh
• Bhutan part of the NCAP project: Study of Climate Change Adaptation in Bhutan
• Bolivia part of the NCAP project: Building Adaptive Capacity in two Semi-Arid Regions of Bolivia
• Colombia part of the NCAP project: Coastal zone management
• Ghana part of the NCAP project: Multi-sectoral adaptation assessments
• Guatemala part of the NCAP project: Introducing Climate Change Adaptation in Water Management Planning
• Mali part of the NCAP project: Study of Climate Change Adaptation in Mali
• Mongolia part of the NCAP project: Climate Change and sustainable livelihoods for rural communities
• Mozambique part of the NCAP project: Climate Change in Mozambique: Linking Adaptation and Disasters
• Senegal part of the NCAP project: Planning for climate change in overlooked sectors - Tourism and Transport
• Tanzania part of the NCAP project: The Tanzanian Adaptation programme: Adapting livelihoods around Mt. Kilimanjaro
• Vietnam part of the NCAP project: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in the Huong River basin
• Yemen part of the NCAP project: Water Scarcity and Climate Change
• Suriname part of the NCAP project: Promotion of Sustainable Livelihood within the Coastal Zone of Suriname , with Emphasis on Greater Paramaribo and Wanica

Lessons Learned

The main findings and key lessons learned in the country projects under the Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme will be synthesized in a book that will be published early next year 2009. The following are some of the ideas that will be discussed in the book:

• Climate change is not the sole challenge that vulnerable communities in developing countries face.

• Climate policies should be in line with the development policies of the countries. Adaptation should be an integral part of development not an add-on.

• Adaptation should focus on resilience building at the community level, this is the first level of response.

• Climate adaptation is part of a continuum (see Figure below).

In trying to build a series of studies that link adaptation to poverty alleviation and development, particularly through Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSPs), NCAP managed to drive the adaptation process forward reaching a point where issues of resilience in development processes began to arise. Interestingly enough, resilience success gives a positive feedback to questions of impacts and vulnerability, coming back to the initial starting point in climate adaptation.

From Vulnerability to Adaptation

• Most vulnerable and livelihoods are the central focus to consider the political, ethical, and strategic options for adaptive action.
• The shift from vulnerability to adaptation needs metrics of impacts that focus on the direct effects on community or household assets: what is at risk and how much is potentially lost.
• Adaptation solutions need to relate to the livelihood assets capital that characterize the [Sustainable Livelihoods Approach].
• Moving the debate from vulnerability assessments to adaptation requires the application of different set of tools and methodologies that allow for the integration of various pieces of information and concerns. The NCAP projects have used a range of methodologies and tools that focus on social learning, stakeholder consultation and participatory rural appraisals. There is no single methodology as there is a range of problems that need to be tackled.
• The shift from vulnerability to adaptation requires the design and implementation of appropriate channels for linking data and information to the decision/policy making process.
• Affecting the political and policy dimensions must be the ultimate test of efficacy of the vulnerability to adaptation process. Integrating the outputs obtained in the project (suitable adaptation initiatives) in political and policy dynamics requires engaging politicians through lobbying, mobilizing public support through information campaigns and steering the attention of powerful ministries (i.e., finance ministry, planning ministry) towards these outputs.

Adaptation and Development

• The consequences of an adaptation strategy may influence and affect sectoral policies, livelihoods and so on. Therefore, adaptation strategies should be integrated into a broader context of development.
• Transition from impact to vulnerability assessments and then to adaptation, is a critical step in moving economies and livelihoods towards more resilient positions.
• A successful adaptation-development agenda could substantially reduce the cost of emergency disaster assistance. Self-reliance realised through effective pre-disaster and adaptation planning, as an integral part of development and aimed at capacity building for the most vulnerable, is a more effective means of disaster risk reduction.
• Integrating adaptation into development planning broadens the metric of impact beyond direct effects (e.g., economic damages, lives lost) to health, social and economic effects (e.g., morbidity, livelihood security, economic investment and growth). the impacts of climate extremes such as droughts, floods and heat waves are measured not only by how much is lost but also by the effects on development and livelihoods.
• Climate factors are not the only factors that stress subsistence systems. Issues of markets, subsidies, access and cultural norms add to the challenge of assuring food security and alleviating poverty.
• To facilitate interactions and interplay between development and adaptation both bottom-up and top-down approaches are needed. Both approaches highlight the fact that adaptation is a multi-scale process that can interact with development efforts at different levels.
• While linking adaptation and development, it is important to analyse both primary and off-farm non-primary production activities, as off-farm income is critical to livelihoods and overall adaptive capacity.
• Integration of adaptation measures needs to nest within national socio-economic considerations. To make progress in this regard, cross-sectoral analysis is necessary to assess the interactions of multiple adaptation strategies and their implications in national development policies. This fully integrated approach is the most effective means of minimising maladaptation, where actions in one sector can have negative impacts in another.

Development to Resilience

• Resilience building focuses on improving coping mechanisms and the capacity to recover from disruptive events.
• The key characteristics of enquiry are to improve coping mechanisms across a range of traditional and modern adaptation technologies, together with an analysis of community and socially centred bounce-back structures that ensure recovery and continuation of the development trajectory.
• Validation of the change to a development-to-resilience paradigm requires evidence that the negative impacts of adverse weather events and climate trends have been significantly reduced.
• Resilience is achieved most successfully when both natural biological and social systems’ diversity are maintained and enhanced. Together these processes will help in building livelihood capitals and entitlements. But the processes must be realised through negotiation. Negotiation should be seen as transparent and be led by the recipient. Imposed solutions will not work.
• Improving coping mechanisms needs appropriate information sets, knowledge of the range, effect and cost of adaptation technologies (both modern and traditional), and access to technologies.
• An enabling and learning environment for knowledge-based activities is fundamental to promote social resilience across a range of scales. Social learning requires reflecting upon experience and considering individual’s values and interest in the process of cognition and action.
• Resilience building requires a positive feedback process that reduces impact.
• The underpinning of resilience planning for adaptation includes sustainable development, risk avoidance, least cost intervention, organizational and social learning, and exploring environmental surprises and tipping points that lead to catastrophic change that moves systems beyond the limits in which resilience can affect a recovery.
• Resilience planning should be normalised as part of the development process as an issue of social justice. In that sense, it must be not considered as an add-on effort and the impacts of resilience planning must be measurable.

QUESTIONS TO REFLECT UPON

• How can science be most effectively used for adaptation planning?

• How can we relate climate change to poverty alleviation?

• Why is it helpful to approach adaptation from the perspective of livelihoods?

• What are effective ways to communicate climate risks and adaptation options to relevant stakeholders?

• What external assistance do developing countries need to develop climate adaptation strategies?

NCAP is also investigating the possible use of MDG style 'targets for adaptation', through research in Bolivia, Mongolia and Bangladesh. For more information on this initiative see the Adaptation Targets pages.

Project Website:

http://www.nlcap.net/