Building capacity to cope

The self-help potential of local agencies is limited by available resources – technical, institutional and financial. Many governments too require significant outside support to implement adaptation strategies for coping with changes in climate. There are three prime reasons why donor governments, relief agencies and other external support agencies should be sympathetic to requests for support:

1. The polluter pays principle: Greenhouse gases come predominantly from the industrialised countries, but it is primarily the developing countries that suffer the worst impacts.

2. Extreme weather and climate events are having devastating impacts on progress towards the shared developmental goals of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Precautionaryinvestments in disaster preparedness and adaptation will help to protect developmental progress.

3. Support for local adaptation pays dividends in savings on relief and recovery costs when the extreme event arrives. The Red Cross estimates that each dollar spent on prevention saves from four to ten dollars in relief (see the South-East Asia
Dialogue summary in Chapter 4 of the main report).

In international circles, there is a growing consensus on the need to mainstream adaptation to climate variability into the poverty reduction and sustainable development agenda. Adaptation to climate change should by 2005 be fundable through the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), but the limitations on funding through National Adaptation programmes of Action (NAPAs) remain quite restrictive (see section 5.4.3). While the debate goes on about the extent to which adaptation to climate variability is part of coping with climate change, other avenues of support have to be opened up. They will come through the regular dialogues between governments and the international development assistance community and will be hastened by governments committing themselves to mainstreaming adaptation to climate into their national water, poverty reduction and sustainable development programmes. Numerous international agencies already provide information sharing, capacity building and research support (see section 5.3 and the agency summaries in Chapter 5).

Click here to view the last chapter: Recommendations.