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    Maxime Souvignet

    In the context of international financial and technical cooperation, specific climate change adaptation (CCA) measures are ensuring investments that are more sustainable, while promoting assets and economic activities that are more resilient to the impacts and consequences of current and projected future climatic conditions. The ECA STUDIES main objectives are to support decision makers in developing their adaptation strategy and to develop CCA measures investment portfolio, including risk transfer.

    Considering climate change adaptation early on in planning and policymaking sets a clear context for interventions at the project level. Climate change impacts should be taken into account in the development of strategies, investment and national adaptation plans (NAPs) by governments, local authorities, communities and businesses. This requires identifying cost-efficient CCA measures, in a transparent and structured manner, to identify which future investments would be sustainable and what residual risk can be covered by risk transfer solutions. Such an approach demands for a comprehensive climate risk management system in order to ensure a climate-resilient development. A plethora of approaches have already been designed to respond to the complexity and the uncertainty of climate change related projects. With regards to the implementation of climate change adaptation strategies, they range from climate vulnerability assessments, risk assessments, economic and/or sustainability impact assessments to decision making support tools. Among these, none has been fully integrating processes from risk assessment to a feasibility of CCA measures.

    The ECA STUDIES, based on the Economics of Climate Change Adaptation (ECA) approach, bridge this gap and offers a unique approach towards the flexible identification of cost-effective CCA measures for a variety of projects and sectors. It addresses in particular the following questions:

    1) What is the potential climate-related damage over the coming decades?

    2) How much of that damage can be averted, using what type of CCA measures?

    3) What investments – will be required to fund those measures – and will the benefits of these investment outweigh the costs?

    The ECA STUDIES offers a systematic and transparent approach that fosters trust and initiates in-depth inter-sectoral stakeholder discussions. The methodology can be flexibly applied from the national down to local level to different sectors and different hazards. It gives also guidance on what aspects to focus on during a feasibility study. It provides key information for programme-based approaches, insurance approaches and has potential to support National Adaption Plans’ (NAPs) development.

    Recently, the ISF received the mandate to implement ECA studies in three (3) different countries (tentative candidates are Honduras, Ethiopia and Vietnam) using the ECA methodology.