Climate Risk Assessment Guide – Central Asia

The Climate Risk Assessment Guide – Central Asia is a practical manual designed to assess the impacts of climate-related events on lives and livelihoods in Central Asia. It provides a structured methodology to downscale climate risk understanding to sub-national and community levels, bridging the gap between long-term climate change modeling and immediate disaster risk assessment. The guide emphasizes a combination of impact-based assessments (using monetary damage and livelihood capital scoring) and perception-based surveys to inform sustainable risk management and policy development.

• The guide identifies a critical need to 'downscale the understanding of climate impacts' to sub-national and community levels because existing national reports are often too broad to guide practical local action and resource prioritization.
• Climate-related hazards in Central Asia are categorized into three types: Direct (e.g., heavy rainfall, extreme heat), Consequent (e.g., flooding, landslides, glacial lake outbursts), and Contributory (e.g., food and water shortages, resource-related conflict).
• The methodology utilizes a modified Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to assess impacts across six types of capital: Human, Natural, Social, Financial, Physical, and Political. Political capital was specifically added to account for the role of governance in risk management.
• Risk is quantified through two primary lenses: monetary value of expected physical damage per capita for specific hazard frequencies, and a qualitative 'livelihood impact score' derived from a consensus-based adaptation of the Delphi technique.
• The guide stresses the importance of perception-based assessments, noting that gaps between objective data and local perceptions can lead to risk management efforts that lack local support or fail to address actual societal concerns.
• Cross-cutting issues such as age and gender are integrated into the process, requiring that data be disaggregated to identify how risks differently affect children, the elderly, men, and women.
• The guide employs a 'six-pack approach' to data collection, prioritizing only data clearly relevant to specific risk parameters to maintain efficiency given the limitations of data availability and resources in Central Asia.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used as the analytical platform to overlay layers of baseline, hazard, damage, and socio-economic data, though the accuracy is limited by the smallest scale of the data used (approximately 10 km for land use).
• Future risk outcomes are projected using simple scenario-based calculations in spreadsheets, such as comparing a baseline of population-linked damage growth against scenarios of successful damage reduction.
• A 'willingness to pay' survey is used to gauge the perceived importance of climate risks; preliminary results from Kyrgyzstan indicated that many respondents prioritize other needs (e.g., livestock, education) over climate risk management.

APA

Kelly, C., Biyalieva, C., Dolgikh, S., Erokhin, S., Fedorenko, A., Gareeva, A., Garcin, Y., Ibraimova, A., Iliasov, S., Mastre, I., Podrezov, A., Volovik, Y., Uzakbaeva, J., & Sidorin, A. (2013). Climate Risk Assessment Guide – Central Asia. Climate and Development Knowledge Network. http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Climate-Risk-Assessment-Guide.pdf

Chicago

Kelly, C., Chinara Biyalieva, Svetlana Dolgikh, Sergey Erokhin, Alexander Fedorenko, Aida Gareeva, Yann Garcin, et al. Climate Risk Assessment Guide – Central Asia. Climate and Development Knowledge Network, 2013. http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Climate-Risk-Assessment-Guide.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{kelly2013climate, author = {Kelly, C. and Biyalieva, Chinara and Dolgikh, Svetlana and Erokhin, Sergey and Fedorenko, Alexander and Gareeva, Aida and Garcin, Yann and Ibraimova, Aliya and Iliasov, Shamil and Mastre, Iren and Podrezov, Andrey and Volovik, Yegor and Uzakbaeva, Jyldyz and Sidorin, Andrey}, title = {{Climate Risk Assessment Guide – Central Asia}}, institution = {Climate and Development Knowledge Network}, year = {2013}, month = jul, url = {http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Climate-Risk-Assessment-Guide.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }