Climate risk management is vitally important process anticipated at minimizing the negative impacts of climate change while strengthening the resilience of communities and ecological structure. It involves a well-ordered approach that identifies prospective risk hazards, evaluates the vulnerabilities of natural and human systems, and implements mitigation and adaptation strategies to tackle these risks. Effective climate risk management is important for deep rooted sustainability, ensuring that climate adaptation is included into development planning and resource allocation. By proactively presiding over risks, governments, businesses, and communities can reduce their vulnerability and improve their ability to cope with climate-related issues.
Climate Risk Assessment: The Foundation of Risk Management
Climate risk assessment is an essential element of climate risk management, delivering the basis for informed decision-making. It involves a detailed evaluation of climate hazards, such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves, and an estimation of susceptibilities, including the vulnerability of communities and ecosystems. The process assesses the resilient competences of these systems and gives precedence to risks based on their potential impact. Tools like CLIMADA and CRISP are essential for this computation, helping model future risks and guide adaptation strategies. By understanding which sectors or regions are most at risk, decision-makers can implement targeted interventions to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience.
Adaptation strategies are the fundamentals of climate risk management. These strategies vary from infrastructure improvements, such as building flood barriers, to policy changes that support climate-adaptive agriculture. In Pakistan, provincial risk assessments for regions like Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have revealed sector-specific vulnerabilities that require adaptive resilient efforts. For instance, Punjab’s reliance on agriculture makes it explicitly vulnerable to drastic weather events, while KP’s mountainous terrain aggravates its susceptibility to landslides and glacial melt. These evaluations guide the development of climate action plans that address each province’s unique challenges, ensuring that adaptation efforts are effectual and impactful.
Successful climate risk management leans towards the active involvement of communities and stakeholders. Collaborative approaches that include local populations in risk assessment and planning help ensure that solutions are locally appropriate and more likely to succeed. Gender-specific risk reduction strategies, for example, highlight the importance of addressing the different ways climate change impacts men and women. Additionally, capacity building, through training and stakeholder engagement, strengthens the resilience of communities and institutions. Continuous monitoring and evaluation are essential to track progress, allowing for the adjustment of strategies and scaling of best practices to enhance the overall effectiveness of climate risk management efforts.
FAQ
Climate Risks and Opportunities defines by EPA (hyperlink)
-Transition Risks: Risks related to the transition to a lower-carbon economy.
-Physical Risks: Risks related to the physical impacts of climate change
-Opportunities: Climate-related opportunities relate to efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, such as resource efficiencies and cost savings, the adoption of low-emission energy sources, the development of new products and services, access to new markets, and building resilience along the supply chain.
CLIMADA: With accurate and reliable data on climate-related risks becoming increasingly important, CLIMADA provides a robust analysis of the cost and benefits of adaptation measures and allows informed resilience investments into adaptation and disaster risk reduction. CLIMADA is an open-source quantitative modelling tool used by ECA to conduct risk assessments. It is a mathematical model written in two different scripting languages, MATLAB and Python.
CLIMADA constitutes a platform to analyse risks of different hazard types (floods, tropical cyclones, droughts, etc.) in a globally, regionally and locally consistent fashion at different resolution levels, at scales from multiple consistent fashion at different resolution levels, at scales from multiple kilometres down to meters, depending on the purpose.
CRISP: CRISP is a freely available, quick and simple to use, interactive web-based working tool for agricultural and rural development practitioners. The tool helps to strengthen national and international agricultural and rural development funding proposals and their implementation. Further, the tool has the potential to assist sectoral adaptation planning and implementation regarding countries’ National Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs).
CRISP guides you through
a process to understand climate related risks associated with specific
agricultural systems, articulate science-based adaptation hypotheses, identify
cascading impacts and review relevant adaptation options.
Women and men experience, perceive and identify risks differently. Everyone can be equally exposed to a hazard, but women and men have different levels of vulnerability and access to resources and have therefore developed different coping skills.
|
Condition/Situation |
Specific Implications for women |
Examples |
|
Impacts of slow onset hazards (drought, desertification, forestation, land degradation etc.) |
Increased workload to collect, store, protect, and distribute water for the household – often a responsibility that falls entirely to women. Increased domestic workload to secure food. Increased numbers of women headed households due to men’s migration. Women’s access to collect food, fodder, wood, and medicinal plants diminishes |
In East Africa, it has been recorded that women walk for over ten kilometers in search of water, and when droughts worsen some even return home empty-handed. In Senegal much arable land is lost due to erosion. As a result, most of the young people and males migrate to the cities to find jobs leaving women in charge of the households. More women than men rely on forest based products to sustain households. Up to 80% of the population of some developing countries rely on traditional medicine as their primary source of health care. Women often have a more specialized knowledge of wild plants used for medicine than men |
|
Lesser access to early warnings and lower ability to respond |
Warnings in many cases do not reach women. Women lack adequate awareness how to act upon warnings. Women lack lifesaving skills such as swimming and climbing. Women tend to take the responsibility of carrying children and elderly to safety |
During the 2006 tsunami, more women died than men – for example in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, male survivors outnumber female survivors by 3 or 4 to 1 |
|
Lower land and other asset ownership |
Less control over production and markets. Less ability to adapt to ecological changes, resulting in crop failure. Loss of income. |
Fewer than 10% of women farmers in India, Nepal and Thailand own land. In Malawi, the value of assets owned by maleheaded households is more than double that of female-headed households. Male-headed households are more likely to own agricultural assets. |
|
Lower income. |
Greater vulnerability in the face of shocks such as food shortages, crop failure, disasters. |
Women earn only 70-80% of the earnings of men in both developed and developing countries. Women have less access to secure and better paid jobs in the formal sector. They are mostly occupied in the informal sector, making less money, with less employment security. |
|
Lower levels of education |
Hampers women’s access to information, and limits their ability to prepare and respond to disasters |
876 million people in the world are illiterate, of whom two-thirds are women |
|
Lower levels of participation at decision making bodies |
Women’s capacities are not applied, their needs and concern are not voiced, and they are overlooked in policies and programs. |
Women are poorly represented in decision making bodies. Sociocultural norms and attitudes bar women’s participation in decision-making. |
|
Poor Access to Ressource. |
Women suffer inequitable access to markets, credit, information and relief services resulting in less ability to recover from disaster losses. |
Analysis of credit schemes in 5 African countries found that women received less than 10% of the credit given to men. Women face more difficulties in accessing credit, as they do not possess assets for collateral
|
Climate risk profiling is a crucial step in understanding and managing the impacts of climate change on various sectors. It involves analysing climate susceptibility and risks at various scales adapting responses to the specific needs of national, provincial and district level setting. This line of action is crucial for conducting adaptation strategies and encouraging resilience.
Climate risk profiles provide a structured approach to understanding and assessing the various risks associated with climate change. The overall goal of climate risk profiles is to enhance preparedness, resilience, and adaptation efforts in the face of climate change. By systematically analyzing and documenting the risks, decision-makers can prioritize actions and allocate resources effectively. These profiles serve as valuable tools for informing policy development, investment strategies, and the implementation of adaptation measures at various levels, from local to global.
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