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Cliamte Change

Facts, knowledge and women, trump myth and superstition

Fionna Douglas's picture




A toolkit for climate change with stakeholders at its core

Jane Ebinger's picture

There is now a set of tools that can help countries assess how vulnerable their energy sector is. Such assessments will be critical for countries to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. The toolkit―HEAT, a Hands-on Energy Adaptation Toolkit, has its roots in work done in 2008. At that time, I contributed to an Eastern Europe and Central Asia wide paper that took stock of projected climate impacts to understand the countries or sectors that were most vulnerable, and to get some sense of the level of exposure. I worked with colleagues to explore what this meant in an energy context.  Our starting point was to ask a series of questions: what changes were we concerned about? How could they affect energy planning, design and operations? How big a risk did this pose to energy security? What experience was there in coping with these issues? 


What emerged was enlightening. Many countries are increasingly vulnerable to changes in seasonal weather patterns, weather variability and extreme events e.g. droughts, floods, heat waves―that can affect the production and supply of energy and affect seasonal energy demand. The degree of exposure depends on the amount of change, how the sector is sensitive to or is affected by these changes and the ability to cope with impacts. This is further exacerbated by socio-economic and inherited issues (e.g. inefficient use of energy and water resources) that affect the coping or adaptive capacity of a country. Out of all we learned, came the development of HEAT.

Russian wildfires: No winners from climate change

Alan Miller's picture




Identify, cost and prioritize: A new report on the economics of adaptation

Joel B. Smith's picture

A policy-maker in Ethiopia, managing a predominantly agricultural economy, and one that is likely to greatly affected by climate change, would probably like to know the impact of climate change as well as what it will cost to adapt to the impacts. Given the potential for more droughts and floods, what are the strategies and costs for adaptation? Like Ethiopia, other developing countries are grappling with the same question. It is an important one, but has not been widely addressed until recently.


This matter was given sudden prominence in 2006 when the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) asked how much financial need developing countries will require to both reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. The COP’s request created an overnight cottage industry estimating the total costs of adaptation by developing countries. Reports were published by the World Bank (2007), Oxfam (2007), the UNFCCC Secretariat (2009), Parry et al. (2009), and others. Most of these studies relied on expert judgment to develop adaptation cost estimates. The UNFCCC, however, applied some “top-down” rules in some sectors to rapidly estimate costs.


The latest and clearly most detailed estimate of the potential costs of adaptation in developing countries was just released in the UNFCCC conference in Bonn by the World Bank titled Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change (EACC). This report was a culmination of years of effort by the Bank to develop global and country level estimates of adaptation costs. The EACC is the most detailed estimate that has been developed to date because one, it addresses more sectors than prior estimates, two,  it does so in a more systematic manner than its predecessors, and three, it estimates global and national level costs. The EACC study estimated global costs for infrastructure, coastal zones, water resources, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, human health, and extreme weather. Each sector’s cost estimate was developed by applying rules to analyze impacts and costs as a result of climate change.