Topic: adaptation

This working paper aims to clarify the issues around insurance mechanisms designed to improve resilience among the poor to climate change impacts. We hope the analysis will inform the ongoing insurance discussions at the UNFCCC in the build up to the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Even though climate change affects countries differently, all countries will need to perform many of the same adaptation functions, such as climate information management and public engagement in adaptation planning. At the end of 2008, the World Resources Institute convened a technical workshop in Bellagio, Italy to begin enumerating a shared set of critical adaptation functions. The resulting “Bellagio Framework” can help identify strengths and gaps in adaptation capacities in a given country, as a basis for prioritizing adaptation actions and investments.

This report assists businesses in Southeast Asia to understand the need to adept to climate change; learn what other are doing in government, civil society and the private sector to promote adaptation; identify the risks and opportunities that climate change impacts present, and act on them.

Note: This paper will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming book Climate Change and Global Poverty: A Billion Lives in the Balance?, by the Brookings Institution Press in 2009.

Clarifies the relationship between adaptation and development by analyzing 135 projects, policies, and other initiatives from the developing world that have been labeled by implementers or researchers as “adaptation to climate change.”