Almost no sector is completely immune to climate risks. This has major implications for development programmes around the world, which can have one or more climate touchpoints across health, water and food systems, industry, trade, education, financial systems, gender equality, cities or transport.
The integration of climate objectives and criteria into the design, funding and delivery of development programmes, often referred to as climate mainstreaming, is therefore becoming a priority for major donors. This is visible in many new projects and programmes seeking to address climate change.
However, one of the great challenges of addressing climate change in international development is the need for retrofitting climate change measures into various existing and ongoing economic development activities, such as urban development, existing infrastructure and transport. For many international development activities, the focus is on development of new investments where climate change concerns are reflected (eg through risk assessments or adaptation measures). This however largely overlooks the need to change approaches to current economic activities. However, retrofitting these concerns are not easy and often associated with significant trade-offs and a need to understand actual climate benefits, both for mitigation and adaptation and compare that with perceived or actual economic costs and benefits. How do we get the balance right? How do we encourage the changes needed to embed climate change actions, especially in ways that maintain and ensure social and economic justice? We must improve our approaches and change beyond nice pledges to do better. Do we need better decision-making tools? Can we utilise AI and big data better? Who should drive the decisions as we recognise the balance between top-down decisions and locally led approaches?
There is a strong link to building and maintaining partnerships to ensure that both commissioning, delivering and assessing partners share the vision and understanding. This involves local as well as central partners. A focus on creating and sustaining partnerships to achieve retrofitting will be an essential useful element of successful delivery of integrated climate solutions in wider economic development activities.
The panel discussions will help shed light on both the understanding of the complexities and the required solutions and could potentially be leading to a tangible outcome of the event in terms of continued collaboration among partners.