Blog Posts: vulnerability

For the first time, loss and damage now resides within the international climate agreement as a standalone concept. It springs from the reality that there are some climate change impacts that cannot be adapted to—impacts that are so severe that they leave in their wake permanent or significantly damaging effects.

While much of climate change discussion focused on critical issues of reducing emissions to avoid dangerous levels of warming, it is important to remember that warming is already happening, and that it contributes to worsening drought, floods, extreme weather and other serious impacts. Encouragingly, action to adapt to these impacts are also part of the discussion at the Paris climate talks currently underway.

Rainfed agriculture sustains millions of farmers in India, meeting 40 percent of India’s food demand. But the impact of a changing climate, including increased droughts and rising temperatures, threatens food production and farming patterns.

The Lower Mekong River Basin (LMB) spans Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, and supports 60 million people. New research shows that climate change could damage $18 billion worth of infrastructure and decrease economic productivity in the region by $16 billion annually by 2050.

Adaptation finance accountability is key to addressing obligations of national governments and international organizations to provide support, but actual funding decisions are often made without involving the populations hit first and worst by climate change, or without understanding how communities are vulnerable.

So who is accountable for making good use of adaptation funds, and who should hold whom accountable?

Using Aqueduct data, participants in a recent workshop in Trifinio, Guatemala developed scenarios for decision-makers to manage water and adapt to climate change.

On September 23, heads of state and leaders in finance, business and civil society will gather in New York City for the United Nations Climate Summit, aimed at jump-starting talks to reach a global climate agreement by December 2015. It's hardly the first time these actors have convened to counter climate change. Here's why this summit is worth watching.

To make informed choices on something as complex as climate change policy, it’s important to incorporate scientific evidence into the decision-making process. Yet oftentimes scientific assessments do not reach decision-makers, making it difficult to develop evidenced-based policies that lead to effective action.

Transformation is a word we use so often in our daily lives that it seems strange to stop and think about what it really means. But in adaptation circles, the definition and role of transformation has recently become a hot topic of conversation, in part because transformational change was an important theme of the recent IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

This is the final installment of WRI’s blog series, Adaptation and the Private Sector. Each post explores ways to engage the private sector in helping vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate change.