Search Climate Insights Directory

The Cape Coast Metropolitan Assembly identifies coastal erosion, flash floods, windstorms, erratic rainfall, droughts, and heat waves as its main climate hazards. Key sensitive sectors include agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, tourism, and water/health. Proposed adaptation measures focus on coastal protection, enforcing building codes and mining laws, nature-based solutions like mangrove planting, and improving early warning systems and irrigation.

The document argues that NAP processes are central to minimizing loss and damage through adaptation and can inform the operationalization of loss and damage funding. It highlights that NAPs contain country-specific data on vulnerabilities, risks, and adaptation limits, while providing statistics on how frequently specific loss and damage concepts—such as slow-onset events, non-economic losses, and human mobility—appear in these plans.

The Youth Emergency Guide, developed by young South Africans (ages 13-25) in partnership with UNICEF and Youth@SAIIA, is a resource designed to build emergency preparedness and social resilience. It defines key concepts such as hazards, risks, and vulnerability, and provides practical steps for youth to identify local risks, develop personal emergency plans, and create early warning systems. The guide covers specific response strategies for floods, pandemics, storms, civil unrest, fires, and droughts, while emphasizing the importance of reliable information and youth leadership in community resilience and policy advocacy.

The Youth Emergency Guide is a youth-led resource designed to empower young South Africans to manage emergencies. It defines key concepts like hazards and social resilience, provides a step-by-step methodology for risk assessment and emergency planning, and offers specific response protocols for floods, wildfires, pandemics, and civil unrest. The guide emphasizes the importance of reliable information, community leadership, and systemic advocacy to prevent future disasters.

The document identifies a critical gap between national-level policy frameworks for climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) and their implementation at the community level in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It argues that while GMS countries have foundational laws and policies, these are often siloed, lacking consistent standards and decentralized finance. The report advocates for scaling up successful community-led models, improving the accessibility of climate finance for local actors, and integrating DRR and CCA into a single, cohesive approach to better serve vulnerable populations, including women and ethnic minorities.

The document introduces the FIRE framework, which consists of six dimensions—fundamental rights and equality, non-discrimination, participation and access to information, governance systems and structures, agency and empowerment, and social norms and context—designed to guide decision-makers in integrating human rights and gender equality into disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate resilience (CR). It argues that social inequality is a key driver of vulnerability and that standard data collection, such as sex-, age- and disability-disaggregated (SADD) data, is insufficient on its own to understand the root causes of risk. The brief provides specific guidance on applying these principles to risk assessments, risk-informed development and land-use planning, and emergency preparedness and response, including early warning, evacuation, and camp management.

The document argues that well-designed disaster risk management strategies, including insurance, are essential adaptation investments to protect developing countries from the increasing economic damages of climate-related disasters. Insurance is presented as a tool to transfer risk, provide immediate liquidity, and build resilience by allowing markets to share the costs of adaptation.

The paper analyzes the evolution of adaptation components in the NDCs of 86 countries, finding that while updated submissions show increased country ownership, better alignment with national adaptation plans, and more detailed sectoral actions, most prioritized actions remain neither investment nor implementation ready.

The paper examines 21 examples of locally led adaptation (LLA) across Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Caribbean and Latin America to provide strategies for financing and implementing resilience efforts. It argues that LLA redresses power imbalances by prioritizing the agency of local organizations and Indigenous peoples, who are often best positioned to identify adaptation solutions. The document recommends that funders and governments increase the volume and flexibility of climate finance, integrate social equity into standard processes, and shift governance to center local priorities.

The document examines the transition of Bangladesh's disaster management from a reactive model to a proactive, risk-reduction framework through the Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme (CDMP). It details the vulnerabilities of Bangladesh to cyclones, floods, and climate change, and evaluates the institutional mechanisms and specific outputs of CDMP Phase I (2004-2009). Key achievements include the creation of the Climate Change Cell and the Disaster Management Information Centre, though the report notes challenges such as high civil service turnover and the need to mainstream risk reduction beyond a single ministry.

The World Resources Institute developed the Urban Community Resilience Assessment (UCRA) to help city planners identify specific resilience needs among urban populations, particularly the urban poor. Piloted in Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre, the tool evaluates vulnerability context, community resilience, and individual capacity. Findings indicate that physical infrastructure, such as early warning systems, does not automatically result in individual behavior change or increased personal resilience. The paper argues that effective urban planning requires participatory engagement with residents to avoid exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and to foster social capital and positive resilience habits.

The document outlines the achievements of the Global Commission on Adaptation, specifically the role of the World Resources Institute (WRI) in co-managing the initiative. It highlights the 'Adapt Now' report, which argues that climate adaptation is a human, environmental, and economic imperative, with benefit-cost ratios for investments ranging from 2:1 to 10:1. The report details a 'Year of Action' that mobilized over 170 partners across tracks including finance, agriculture, resilient cities, and nature-based solutions. Key outcomes include the mobilization of $790 million for small-scale food producers, the creation of the 'Principles for Locally Led Adaptation', and the launch of the '1,000 Cities Adapt Now' program. The document concludes by calling for scaled-up climate finance for developing countries and the integration of climate risks into national budgetary and policy decisions.

The report investigates the May 2022 extreme rainfall event in Eastern Northeast Brazil, which caused 133 deaths and displaced over 25,000 people. Observational analysis indicates that 7-day and 15-day rainfall events of this magnitude are exceptionally rare in the current climate, with return periods of approximately 1-in-500 and 1-in-1000 years, respectively. While climate models exhibited systematic errors in precipitation magnitudes for this specific event, the authors conclude that human-caused climate change is at least partially responsible for increasing the likelihood and intensity of such rainfall. The study further highlights that structural vulnerabilities, including unplanned urbanisation in low-income neighbourhoods and an infrastructure deficit, significantly exacerbated the disaster's impact.

The study concludes that anthropogenic climate change made the record-breaking early season heat in northern Argentina and Paraguay approximately 60 times more likely. The analysis focused on the 7-day average of daily maximum temperatures, finding that the 2022 event was an exceptional occurrence that would have been unlikely without human-induced warming. The report also highlights the region's high vulnerability due to urban heat island effects, informal settlements lacking electricity, and the timing of the heatwave before populations had acclimated to summer temperatures.

The study concludes that human-induced climate change approximately doubled the probability of the April 2022 extreme rainfall event in Eastern South Africa and increased its intensity by 4-8%. While the event had a return time of about 20 years in the current climate, it would have been rarer in a 1.2°C cooler world. The disaster's impact was severely exacerbated by structural vulnerabilities, including the legacy of apartheid spatial planning and the prevalence of informal settlements in high-risk areas.

The study concludes that greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions contributed to the increased intensity and probability of heavy rainfall during the 2022 tropical storm events in Madagascar, Mozambique, and Malawi. While Tropical Storm Ana was a rare 1-in-50-year event for Mozambique and Malawi, Cyclone Batsirai was a more common 1-in-2-year event for Madagascar. The humanitarian impact was severely amplified by compound factors, including preceding floods, existing droughts in southern Madagascar, and high socio-economic vulnerability. Despite accurate forecasting by regional meteorological centers, infrastructure damage and a lack of trust in warnings hindered effective responses.