Basic principles of comprehensive measures for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation
As global commitment to and investment in disaster risk management continues to increase, practitioners and policymakers are developing a deeper understanding of good practices, enablers and barriers to success. At the same time, innovative research in the field of climate change adaptation can quickly provide valuable evaluation indicators for the basic elements of effective adaptation projects. Recently, those working in the development and humanitarian sectors have engaged in constructive discussions on how to build resilience in response to a variety of shocks and stresses, including hazards and the effects of climate change. During the discussion, it was discovered that the experiences gained and the challenges faced from the two aspects of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation overlap significantly. Therefore, a common understanding of comprehensive measures for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation has gradually been reached.
Based on the above growing understanding, the following “10 principles for integrated disaster risk management and climate change adaptation”11 were formed. Collectively, these principles provide development and humanitarian practitioners with a set of standards for promoting disaster and climate resilience that can be adapted across project cycles across multiple sectors and scenarios.
(1) Enhance the understanding of disaster factors and climate change: Hazards, climate variability and climate change will have an impact on relevant regions and populations. By strengthening their understanding of historical changes, current conditions and future The recognition of trends lays the foundation for human decision-making and action, thereby improving resilience to disasters and climate change. These understandings need to include hazards and climate change impacts at multiple scales, such as regional and local scales. Enhance understanding of hazards and climate change by engaging all stakeholders in the risk analysis process and sharing experiences.
(2) Enhance the understanding of exposure, vulnerability and ability: Assessing the vulnerability and ability of groups, systems and resources should be to determine the implementation area and target population of the project (including the vulnerability people with different perceptions) and project objectives, as well as measures to improve disaster and climate resilience. This requires not only analysis of currently observed climate change impacts but also projections of future climate change impacts. Enhance awareness of the causes of exposure, vulnerabilities and capabilities of all stakeholders through process participation and sharing of experiences.
(3) Clarify rights and responsibilities: National and local governments should become the main body of responsibility for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, improve people's awareness of rights, and ensure that people enjoy their due rights. The governance G system and policy environment need to ensure that people at risk or affected by disasters and climate change enjoy their due rights, so that they have the right to demand that the government assumes responsibility for decision-making and action. In addition, other stakeholders, such as NGOs, should complement and facilitate the relationship between the responsible subjects and the rights subjects.
(4) Strengthen the participation and action of at-risk groups: All people at risk have the right to participate in decision-making processes that affect their lives. People's direct understanding of the impact is an important basis for ensuring that they analyze and take action based on experience. At-risk populations themselves and their agents determine the sustainability of strategies to promote resilience. Therefore, all policy processes and actions require the direct participation of at-risk groups, including women, men, children and high-risk groups.
(5) Promote systemic participation and change: Vulnerability and exposure due to hazards and climate change impacts have multiple causes and driving forces, and strategies to improve disaster and climate resilience require the whole society and involvement of all sectors of government. The goal of multi-sector and multi-stakeholder engagement is to place disaster and climate resilience at the core of development planning. The commitment of all actors to this goal should be reflected in their respective policies, plans and budgets.
(6) Promote multi-level collaboration: An enabling policy environment is crucial for actions taken by families, communities and localities. Similarly, the impact of a policy or regulation depends on its implementation by all levels of government and its relevance to at-risk populations. Decisions and actions taken at all levels should learn from each other and be coordinated with development plans.
(7) Learn from and establish a multi-channel knowledge system: Disaster and climate change risk analysis should supplement local traditional cognition with the results of scientific research, thereby promoting the formation of new cognition. Measures to improve disaster and climate resilience should promote the repeated implementation of effective measures, encourage independent innovation and introduce appropriate foreign technologies to help solve new or intensified challenges. Monitor and evaluate implemented strategies and projects to ensure knowledge is absorbed and experiences are shared.
(8) Adhere to flexibility and responsiveness: Due to the uncertainty in the effects and impacts of climate change, especially at the local level, the uncertainty is higher, and many dynamic processes (such as urbanization and environmental degradationG) can affect exposure and vulnerability, so disaster and climate change risk analyzes need to take into account new knowledge. Likewise, projects and strategies that promote disaster and climate resilience should remain flexible to adapt to new situations as they arise.
(9) Focus on different time scales: The analysis process, strategy formulation and project design all need to focus on currently known risks and possible future scenarios. Preventing the occurrence of known hazards cannot be ignored so that it can support the building of adaptive capacity for the long-term impacts of climate change and other potential, unknown shocks or threats.
In addition, corresponding resource allocation and planning of adaptation activities need to be carried out according to time scales.
(10) Follow the principle of doing no harm: Strategies and projects to improve disaster and climate resilience should always include an assessment of their potential negative impacts, including resulting conflicts and their impact on the environment. Once potential hazards are identified, measures that can significantly reduce or remove negative impacts need to be incorporated into implementation strategies and project designs. To avoid creating misunderstandings or promoting inappropriate adaptation to G, projects should always be assessed on a multi-hazard and multi-impact basis.
Chapter 3 to Chapter 6 of this guide illustrate how to apply an integrated approach to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in different fields and scenarios during the project implementation cycle.
Case study: Vietnam’s central coastal provinces adapt to increasing vulnerability to climate change 12
Project implementation location: Vietnam
Project implementer: World Vision< /p>
Along Vietnam’s 3,000-kilometer-long coastline and vast low-lying river deltas, local residents make a living from rice production and offshore farming. The important long-term threats they face are rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion caused by climate change. 13. More direct threats come from increasingly severe typhoons and increasingly frequent floods.
In 2005, World Vision began working in Quang Ngai, a coastal province in central Vietnam. The local community was seriously affected by the disaster and faced huge difficulties in restoring production. To improve local adaptive capacity, one of the projects focuses on leveraging a variety of existing local assets to increase community resilience to disasters and extreme climate events. 43 small and medium-sized basic facilities were built in 37 small villages, including field road maintenance and hardening to ensure smooth traffic during the rainy season, and playground padding to prevent children from coming into contact with sewage. More than 1,000 households in 49 villages also received loans to repair their houses. The project also focuses on creating alternative economic income opportunities for families so that they no longer rely on growing a single crop for their livelihood. 2,583 households received support to generate additional income, such as growing bamboo or selling agricultural products, instead of solely growing rice and aquaculture.
School-based programs ensure that children have the knowledge and information to make adequate judgments and protect themselves in the face of disasters. During the project, the Red Cross provided wireless communication systems and radio stations for the dissemination of disaster preparedness information in the community. The project also developed Household and Village Disaster Risk Management Plans (DRRPs), which facilitate the development and adoption of flexible forward-looking decision-making and governance measures, and promote multi-level planning through integration with provincial, municipal, district and community level planning. Collaboration between hierarchical departments. In order to strengthen the participation and action of at-risk groups, more than 100 village coordinators were selected in the project and 10 rescue teams were formed to train them in natural disaster mitigation and medical rescue. Accordingly, they helped 10 towns, 50 villages and more than 7,000 households develop their own disaster risk management plans, which were integrated into existing regional and national plans. School-based disaster preparedness projects directly improve children’s welfare, benefiting 500 teachers and 20,000 students.
Through the implementation of this project, the following experiences have been learned: ① Carrying out disaster risk management and climate change adaptation within the existing government framework and incorporating it into local planning is the key to obtaining government support and providing support for local projects. The key to securing resources; ② Although creating an enabling environment and encouraging innovation are crucial to promoting the development of alternative livelihood measures, most households receiving microloans have a very limited scope of investment, with most investing in bamboo cultivation and fish roe production. Sauce and growing vegetables, etc., leading to market saturation in these industries. The long distance between Quang Ngai Province and major commercial centers amplifies this saturation phenomenon; ③ Due to the lack of labor, knowledge, land and market chains required to maintain new livelihood activities, not all Livelihood projects can be successful. Therefore, when developing diversified livelihood activities, it is necessary to provide relevant technologies at the same time, which is crucial to ensuring the improvement of adaptive capacity.
Some new methods of economic income were not successful. For example, planting bamboo shoots on the river bank did not increase economic income because the bamboo shoots were flooded before they grew. This shows that just owning assets is not enough. Improve adaptability. During project implementation, it is assumed that people have the relevant labor, knowledge, land and market chains to ensure income from the sale of bamboo and household agricultural products. However, growing bamboo shoots requires certain technical knowledge, and the growth of technical knowledge is a long-term investment. Project results confirm that long-term investment in technical knowledge is a challenge for communities that need to quickly increase their incomes.
FAQ
1. What is the difference between disaster risk management and climate change adaptation?
Disaster risk management and climate change adaptation have similar goals and the same benefits, and are therefore closely linked. Both focus on reducing people's vulnerability to hazards. Improve people's ability to predict, respond and recover from disasters; as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of climate-related hazards, disaster risk management measures are critical to support communities in adapting to climate change.
Not all disaster risk factors are related to climate.
Disaster factors related to climate (or hydrometeorology) mainly include floods, droughts and storms. Climate-related disaster risk management can also be applied to geological disaster factors (such as earthquakes, typhoons and volcanic eruptions), technological disaster factors (such as earthquakes, typhoons and volcanic eruptions). e.g. industry, chemical spills) and conflicts. Likewise, the impacts of climate change are not necessarily all hazards and include long-term effects on communities such as increased temperatures, abnormal seasonal patterns, variability in precipitation patterns and rising sea levels, as well as impacts on food and food security, health and The aftermath of poverty.
2. What is the difference between climate and weather?
The difference between weather and climate is time scale. Weather refers to changes in temperature, precipitation, and wind from hours to days; climate refers to the long-term average state of weather conditions (greater than 30 years).
3. How to deal with uncertainty in climate predictions?
Although there are uncertainties in climate projections, the main conclusions of climate change science are based on the fact that the Earth is warming due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere caused by human activities. One conclusion has high credibility. Since there are scientific uncertainties in climate predictions and climate change involves many aspects of human life, decisions on climate change actions need to be based not only on scientific considerations, but also on a wide range of social, economic and environmental factors.
4. Is climate change adaptation the only measure?
The answer is no. To combat climate change, the world is also working to address its cause - greenhouse gas pollution. If current emission trends continue, the global average temperature will rise by 2°C to 3°C in the next 50 years, and may exceed 5°C or 6°C by the end of the 21st century (Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 2006). This will have a variety of serious consequences: from melting permafrost to the disappearance of tropical rainforests (and with them the loss of stored carbon), the disappearance of almost all polar glaciers, and the melting of polar ice caps. Once the warming threshold of 2°C to 3°C is reached, it will become extremely difficult to prevent global warming.
Therefore, the key issue facing mankind is how to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and control the danger of global warming within a controllable range, which requires tremendous efforts from all countries in the world.
However, although everyone can take action to reduce emissions, some regions account for only a small part of global greenhouse gas emissions but are most severely affected by climate change and need to prioritize adaptation measures. to cope with potential impacts.
5. Is it realistic to adopt disaster risk management for humanitarian relief?
Even when needs are urgent, humanitarian assistance in its various forms can increase the resilience of individuals, families and communities themselves and of local institutions. For example, cash transfers can balance people’s emergency needs with protecting their livelihood assets without increasing their vulnerability. When international organizations cooperate with local organizations to distribute emergency aid supplies (such as temporary shelters), the two parties can help each other. On the one hand, local organizations can help international organizations effectively distribute emergency aid supplies; on the other hand, local organizations can benefit from disaster relief. Gain experience to help them improve community disaster preparedness capabilities. In this way, effective humanitarian assistance can be provided for different disaster scenarios, and humanitarian assistance is also a realistic expectation of people. For more guidance, see section 5.2 Early Recovery in Humanitarian Crisis.
In slow-onset disasters there are greater opportunities to reduce the risk of current and future disasters. Development and humanitarian organizations can provide assistance to help people reduce their risk of illness, for example by restoring water sources in drought-prone areas and providing chlorine and knowledge to disinfect drinking water in flood-prone areas; they can also provide support to strengthen early warning systemsG Technical support to improve evacuation processes and enhance local government’s ability to evaluate and reduce risks. For more guidance, see section 5.4 Slow-Onset Disasters.
Several core standards of the Global Humanitarian Minimum Standards for Disaster Response are relevant to disaster risk management. For more relevant practical actions, indicators and guidance notes, see the Global Handbook (page 114 of Tools and Resources).
Tools and Resources
For more information and links, see Tools and Resources page 115.