In this publication, ‘Integrating climate resilience in policy and planing of low emission developments strategies‘, Ecosynergy presents climate resilience in the context of low emission development strategies (LEDS) – namely policy and plans – and discusses how policymakers can include climate resilience in their development planning. 

The mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions contributes to halting dangerous climate change, but the effects of a changing climate are already being felt in many parts of the world. Countries’ current and future development strategies need to consider rising sea levels, changes in precipitation patterns, more extreme weather events, and changes in temperature. They will need to find ways to strengthen societal, economic and technical infrastructures in order to cope with these, and other, impacts of climate change. It is relatively straightforward to incorporate climate resilience considerations into decisions – if the changes are already known. The difficulty for policymakers is in having to consider projected or anticipated climate changes on a 20-, 30- or 50-year horizon. Planning and justifying investments that accommodate different future climate scenarios can be a daunting task, one key way of coping is to integrate climate resilience into LEDS.

This paper introduces the key concepts of vulnerability, mitigation, adaptation and climate resilient pathways. Three main approaches are outlined for integrating climate resilience considerations into planning LEDS and policies: climate proofing, climate resilient pathways and societal resilience. Sector level examples of climate resilient LEDS, collected from country experiences, illustrate concepts useful to policymakers working the fields of climate and development at national and subnational levels. It also considers how policymakers must operate under uncertainty: climate change is happening and its impacts can already be felt, monitored and quantified and this, in turn, is starting to inform the way countries design and review their LEDS.

Download the paper here.

Read more about climate resilience in our interview with Barbara Oliveira from Ecosynergy here.

Photo: Marcos Villalta / Save the Children