A Climate Risk Management Approach to Disaster Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change UNDP Expert Group Meeting. Integrating Disaster Reduction with Adaptation to Climate Change Havana, June 17-19, 2002 United Nations Development Programme A CLIMATE RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO DISASTER REDUCTION AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................................................ 3 SYNTHESIS ................................................................................................................................................................................. 9 1.0 Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change ............................................................................................ 10 2.0 Climate Related Disaster Loss and Unsustainable Development ............................................................................ 11 3.0 Risk and Disaster: the Basic Causes. ............................................................................................................................ 13 4.0 Global Change, Complexity and Uncertainty ............................................................................................................. 14 5.0 Risk Management Differing Entrances, the Same Problem. ................................................................................ 15 5.1 Disaster Response, Development and Environmental Institutional Approaches ........................................... 16 5.2 The Climate Change Adaptation Approach ......................................................................................................... 16 5.3 The Challenge of Integrating the Concerns of Different Practitioner Communities ................................... 18 6.0 Integrated Climate Risk Management ......................................................................................................................... 22 7.0 Some Parameters and Indicators for Integrated Climate Risk Management. .......................................................23 8.0 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................ 25 SEMINAR PAPERS .................................................................................................................................................................. 27 1. Adapt and Thrive: Combining Adaptation to Climate Change, Disaster Mitigation, and Natural Resources Management in a New Approach to the Reduction of Vulnerability and Poverty ........................... 28 2. Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessments to Climate Change: An Evolution of Conceptual Thinking ........... 45 3. Managing Risks of Climate-related Losses on Decadal Time Scales ...................................................................... 60 4. Scaling-up: Resilience to Hazards and the Importance of Cross-scale Linkages ..................................................70 5. Integrating Disaster Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change: Needs, Benefits and Approaches, from a South Pacific Perspective ................................................................................... 87 6. Establishing a Common Ground to Bring Together Disaster Reduction and Climate Change Communities Challenges and Opportunities ........................................................................................................ 118 7. Risk Management and Burden Sharing in Climate Change Adaptation and Natural Disaster Mitigation ..... 130 9. Ethical Bases of Risk Management ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 134 9. Building Resilience to Climate Change through Adaptive Management of Natural Resources ....................... 162 10. Adaptation Responses from the Central American Energy Sector with Unintended Consequences to Global Climate Change ................................................................................................................. 178 11. Disaster Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change A CARICOM Experience ......................................... 187 12. Linking Adaptation to Climate Change and Disaster Mitigation in the Eastern Caribbean: Experiences and Opportunities ..................................................................................................................................203 13. Risk Management and Adaptation: Reflections with Implications for Africa .....................................................215 LIST OF PARTICIPANTS........................................................................................................................................................ 231 AGENDA ..................................................................................................................................................................................233 ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................................................................................................... 234 1 A Climate Risk Management Approach to Disaster Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change UNDP Expert Group Meeting. Integrating Disaster Reduction with Adaptation to Climate Change Havana, June 17-19, 2002 United Nations Development Programme A CLIMATE RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO DISASTER REDUCTION AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE Executive Summary 3 E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y Executive Summary Disaster Losses and Unsustainable environmental practices are at the root of much of Development the new disaster risk. The achievement of the UN Millennium Goals, in areas such as poverty reduction, Disaster occurrence and losses associated with health and education will be impossible unless extreme and increasingly not so extreme climate concerted efforts are made to manage and reduce events have increased dramatically in recent years. the disaster risks associated with potentially damaging While many of the emerging patterns of disaster risk climatic events. are associated with natural hazards that show no tendency to increases in magnitude and recurrence, human interventions in the natural environment are Global Change, Complexity and generating new socio-natural hazards, mainly Uncertainty associated with climate events. In many incidences of Processes of global change are adding new and new flooding, landslide, drought, forest fire and even more intractable dimensions to the problems of coastal erosion, environmental degradation has risk accumulation and disaster occurrence and loss transformed natural resources into new hazards. At associated with climatic events. Due to global change, the same time, the social, economic, territorial, rapid and turbulent changes in risk patterns in a given physical and political vulnerability of populations in region are rarely autonomously generated and may, many developing countries continues to worsen, in numerous cases, be caused by economic decisions weakening their capacity to absorb the impact of and taken on the other side of the globe. This territorial recover from extreme climate events. complexity of causal factors extends down to include Rapidly increasing levels of disaster losses are the impacts of national, sectoral and territorial beginning to outweigh development gains in a development policies on regions and localities. number of countries. This is particularly the case in The scientific evidence that climate is changing the Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It is now due to greenhouse gas emissions is now incontestable. very clear that flawed development and It is equally well accepted that climate change will 4 A CLIMATE RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO DISASTER REDUCTION AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE alter the severity, frequency and spatial distribution environmental community has increasingly seen the The scientific of climate-related hazards. However, even while relevance of environmental management and good evidence that modelling of the linkages between global climate resources use for hazard control and reduction. climate is changing due to greenhouse change and particular extreme climate events However, despite the awareness raised by the UN gas emissions is becomes increasingly sophisticated, it is still not International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction now incontestable. possible to predict with any degree of confidence how (IDNDR) in the 1990s, disaster risk has continued to It is equally well particular climate events in specific locations will accumulate. Most national and international efforts accepted that behave in the future. Even with regular and much continue to be fundamentally preparedness and climate change will better understood climate phenomenon like ENSO, response focused. However, a large number of alter the severity, considerable regional and temporal variations in successful experiences in Asia, Latin America, the frequency and impacts are observed from event to event. Caribbean and Africa, in which different risk spatial distribution of Humans have gradually and spontaneously been management approaches were piloted, have built up climate-related adapting to the variations in climate but the rapid a substantial body of knowledge on