Harnessing nature to help people adapt to climate change

NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 2 | JULY 2012 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange As Earth’s climate continues to change at an unprecedented rate1, people face mounting impacts. Ongoing research since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 assessment report underscores the urgent need for rapid progress on national and global adaptation efforts2. From sea-level rise to heightened hurricane activity, longer and more frequent droughts and floods, and acidification of the world’s oceans, lives and livelihoods will be increasingly challenged3. Communities that faced the surging waters of the Indus River in Pakistan or the extraordinary heatwave in western Russia in 2011 have probably seen the face of an increasingly common future. The December 2011 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Durban, South Africa saw decision-makers from 194 countries progress with plans to finance global adaptation efforts through the so-called Green Climate Fund, first articulated at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. The Durban talks resolved key issues related to the fund’s design, readying its coffers to receive the US$100 billion per annum that developed nations have committed to leveraging by 2020 to help developing nations mitigate and adapt to climate change. These prospective funding flows, in combination with rapidly rising levels of multilateral (for example, the World Bank’s Pilot Program on Climate Resilience), bilateral (for example, Germany’s International Climate Initiative) and national adaptation finance, mean that adaptation efforts are poised to receive unprecedented funding in a bid to meet estimates of global adaptation need, ranging from US$49 billion to US$171 billion per year4. Hence, the multibillion-dollar question is: what will this money be spent on? Adaptation to climate change can incorporate a range of potential actions. Although no single established typology of adaptation actions exists, they can be loosely categorized into ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ approaches5. Soft approaches generally focus on information, policy, capacity building and institutional function. They include measures that encourage changes in behaviour to reduce potential losses from specific climate hazards (for example, the development of early warning systems for droughts or floods), risk-spreading measures that help people cope with climaterelated losses (for example, insurance against extreme weather events for farmers) and measures that enhance people’s overall resilience to a range of climate impacts (for example, education Harnessing nature to help people adapt to climate change