Progressing the adaptation agenda

Continuation of multistakeholder dialogues The multistakeholder Dialogues have been a useful contribution to improving participation, knowledge and skills. They have brought together stakeholders from many different camps – often camps that do not commonly interact. Advocacy and awareness-raising has influenced river basin committees and government agencies and brought water-and-climate issues to the attention of the general populace and the politicians – so securing a broad and political basis for action. Practical examples of local action include Nagoya and the San Pedro and Lena basins. Other examples in community-based flood mitigation are Bandung City in Indonesia, the tsunami disaster reduction awareness programme in Papua New Guinea, and the NGO-driven floodwater campaign of the Rhine.The Dialogues have shown there to be a large amount of knowledge already out there, but there are evident areas where this can be improved – particularly in consolidation and focus. Fruitful areas for action are seen to lie in common adaptation frameworks, baseline studies, international information sharing, integrated information systems and the piloting of adaptation options. Information systems on disasters have mushroomed in recent years, including Relief web, the Southern African Flood and Drought Information Network, the National Natural Disaster Knowledge Network (Nanadisk-Net) in India and the Australian Disaster Information Network (AusDIN). Vulnerability assessments Hazard (or vulnerability) assessments can be of a great help to planners and managers in their prevention of serious damage through land-use planning and disaster management. Hazard maps are finding routine applications in several countries, including the US, UK, Japan, France, Norway and some developing countries. ESCAP/WMO initiated the Flood Hazard Mapping project for the Typhoon Committee area as a means to share information amongst member countries.

Most currently available vulnerability assessment methodologies adopt a “top-down” approach. The aim is to provide a comparative overview of the regions that may require priority attention from the development assistance community. There are
problems though with these assessments (see Chapter 3 of the main report). The resolution scale of most global models is too small and the timescale too long to encompass local climate variability. Though some grassroots level vulnerability assessment methodologies are becoming available, they are still under development and their use is quite limited. Much greater use is to be encouraged, both alone and in combination with top-down assessments. There is scope for research and development to improve the scale and focus of the climate models – to help planners to plan better, and to give primary stakeholders some sense of what might really be going to happen. Despite increasing predictive skills, there is still a widely recognised gap in the capacity to forecast climate at basin, regional or national level over seasons or years. There are calls for development of multidisciplinary, grassroots level vulnerability assessment tools. There are also calls for integrated science programmes – linking climate to epidemiology, or linking food productivity under water shortages to calorific intake. The overall direction is towards integration – merging climate with other factors so that it can be assessed in a wider context during decision-taking. All these activities depend on data. Over the years, many hydrological observation stations in developing countries have fallen into disrepair and disuse. Restoring and extending the hydrological data base is a pressing need and an important condition for adaptation progress in many countries.

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