#stronginstitutions

Mitigation of climate change by cutting emissions is the ultimate form of disaster risk reduction as it prevents the creation of new risk while also trying to reduce the stock of existing levels of risk. There is no doubt that if we succeed in holding the increase in the average global temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C, this will make an enormous contribution to reducing disaster losses in the future. However, in a world that has already warmed by 1°C on average, where sea-levels are rising and Arctic Sea ice and glaciers are disappearing, adapting to the impacts will require an unrelenting, immediate and long-term effort, no matter how much the bar is raised in terms of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is also now an opportunity to ensure that the work that will commence on climate change adaptation is coherent with the ongoing efforts around the world to reduce disaster losses from the consequences of other risk drivers which it would be foolish to view separately from climate change. Indeed, the interlocking nature of all risk drivers is made very clear in the new Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. It was the first pillar of the post-2015 development agenda to be put in place when it was adopted in March at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, held in Sendai, Japan. SYNERGIES It calls for more dedicated action to tackle underlying disaster risk drivers “such as the consequences of poverty and inequality, climate change and variability, unplanned and rapid urbanization, poor land management and compounding factors such as demographic change, weak institutional arrangements, non-risk informed policies…” It’s a long list. The disaster risk reduction community was apprehensive that the Paris Agreement would treat climate risk in - less than splendid - isolation from the rest. These fears were somewhat allayed with specific mention of the Sendai Framework in the preamble of the agreement, and the focus in Articles 7 and 8 on strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change in language that resonates with the goals of the Sendai Framework to reduce both risk and disaster losses. Specifically, the Sendai Framework seeks to reduce mortality, the numbers of people affected, economic losses and damage to critical infrastructure such as schools and hospitals - efforts which will be reflected in the sought-for substantial increase in the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020. This needs to interlock with the tasks set out in Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, particularly the formulation of “nationally determined prioritised actions, taking into account vulnerable people, places and ecosystems”. URBANIZATION OPPORTUNITY The Sendai Framework also calls for a substantial increase in the availability of, and access to, multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information by 2030, an activity mentioned in Article 8 of the Paris Agreement which also references the resilience of communities, livelihoods and ecosystems. One example of the synergies we should expect from the complementary nature of risk reduction and adaptation agendas emerged at the Paris conference in the shape of a French government initiative on Climate Risk Early Warning Systems (CREWS). It is backed by the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). The governments of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have already agreed to give more than $80 million to equip up to 80 countries with better climate risk early warning systems. Considering that some 90 percent of all major recorded disasters are weather-related, this is a very practical measure towards saving lives and reducing disaster losses. As outlined in the Lima to Paris Action Agenda, climate change action can also impact positively on rapid urbanisation to ensure it takes account of the environment and avoids placing people and critical infrastructure in locations that are inherently unsafe for living and working. Some 60 percent of the area expected to be urbanised by 2030 remains to be built. The challenges and the opportunities are great. The creation of new risk must be avoided, and every effort made to reduce existing levels of risk whether it is environmental, technological or biological in nature. The New Year summons us to a post-2015 agenda based on action and implementation.

The world now has a climate treaty that will become a public health treaty as countries take action. As stated in the agreement, “the right to health”, will be central to the actions countries take. This is a historic opportunity for WHO and the entire health community.

Nearly a decade in the making, the Paris Agreement not only sets ambitious aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming well below 2°C, it pushes countries to develop adaptation plans that will protect human health from the worst impacts of climate change, such as, droughts, heat waves and floods.

Actions cannot be taken without resources. Working together, developed countries have committed to financing clean and resilient futures in countries most vulnerable to climate impacts. Through monitoring and revision of national commitments every five years, the world will begin to see improvements not only in the environment, but also in health, including reductions in the more than 7 million deaths worldwide attributed to air pollution every year.

While the world has been late in taking action against climate change, we now have the basic foundation to safeguard the environmental and social conditions on which health depends, including clean air, energy and water.

Now, WHO and the more than 13 million health professionals who added their voices to the call for a safer and healthier future at COP21, need to build on this foundation. Fortunately, we’ve already begun.

Building resilient health systems

In collaboration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, we launched the first 15 Climate Change and Health Country Profiles ahead of COP21 to provide countries up-to-date information about the current and future impacts of climate change on human health and current policy responses.

Now, we’re working to produce a profile for every country so that they can use them to track their 5-year progress moving forward. We know that what gets measured gets done so we must give countries the tools to help them reach their Paris commitments, and raise their ambition even further.

Next, WHO is working with countries to build climate resilient health systems, meaning that when climate-related disasters strike, or environmental conditions are gradually degraded, health systems are able to face the challenges head-on. For example, WHO is already working to put into place heat-health warning systems to save lives during heatwaves, and piloting climate-resilient water-safety plans, so that when floods and droughts hit, this doesn’t lead to outbreaks of cholera and other water-borne diseases.

Beyond making health facilities climate resilient, we also need to ensure all facilities have access to clean energy. Much of the world’s health facilities still lack electricity, meaning vulnerable populations are without access to life-saving medical technologies. Supported by the new agreement, we will be able to scale-up our role in the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which aims to achieving universal access to energy by 2030.

At this year’s World Health Assembly countries agreed to a resolution to address the health impacts of air pollution. In line with this agreement, the WHO secretariat is scaling up its capacity to help countries implement WHO’s outdoor and indoor air quality guidelines. It is also launching an urban health initiative in four cities early next year to test strategies for reducing short-lived climate pollutants, such as black carbon and methane.

This is just the start of a comprehensive approach to urban health, that will link WHO with our partner UN agencies in a comprehensive initiative to combat climate change, and promote sustainable development, in cities around the world.

These are the first steps we are taking. The the road ahead is far from easy, but we’re excited to have the whole world focused on taking actions to create a healthier planet and people.

This WHO post was written by:

Dr. Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health AND Dr. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, WHO Climate Change Lead, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health

UNITAR has organized a huge collaborative network of UN organizations under the banner of UN CC:Learn, or the One UN Climate Change Learning Partnership. Can you discuss its inception?

UN: CC Learn was born in Copenhagen, even though education and training were not on the agenda.  Meanwhile, the UN System was already doing well on collecting knowledge about climate change. It’s just that it was scattered and dispersed. So the initial idea was: how do we find a single entry point into the UN for somebody keen to develop their skills and knowledge on climate change. We wanted to establish a global partnership to support knowledge sharing, promote the development of common climate change learning materials, and coordinate leaning interventions through collaboration of UN agencies and other partners.

So it just developed organically?

Still, we had to find funding. We started with small amounts available from within the UN, but then the Swiss Development Corporation  really got what we were doing from the start—we were trying to build global knowledge and skills, and we were aiming to help the poorest and vulnerable  countries first. The important thing is  that we trying to help countries to be organized about knowledge and skills for climate change.  We help countries to organize skills development in a recurrent and systematic way; not ad hoc.  Above all trainings for the development and implementation of national strategies must be relevant to each countries plans and priorities.

What is your role? 

I manage the climate change initiatives of UNITAR. It’s a good model because we don’t purport to be the experts on climate change. We are the training  experts— making sure that new knowledge is presented so that people are likely to remember it, and use it.  This can be done face to face or through  distance learning, and frequently a combination of the two. The power of UNITAR is that we have direct access to all the technical experts we need to within the UN system; to bring in the knowledge. Want to know about health? We go to the WHO. Food security? FAO and the World Food Programme. Climate science? UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization.

How do you work with governments at the national level?

The first thing we try to do is provoke a national discussion. For example we try to  bring in the ministry of education to have a conversation about climate change, even though its not common for them to be involved in  climate change. But we don’t stop there. We  bring in other sectors too: agriculture, energy, transportation, water. We have a proper dialogue on the learning priorities and help to develop what we call a national climate change learning strategy. The second step is to reach out to all partners to support the strategy. We try to engage the national budget, development partners, as well as UN: CC Learn funding, to see just how much we can do.

Angus Mackay 

Does the project’s work have pathways to be integrated into national plans?

Take the Dominican Republic—the country has been really been a key partner. We worked with the National Council on Climate Change and through them the national teacher training institute (INAFOCAM)  to build  teachers’ knowledge and methods for the classroom on climate change—how to produce teaching materials, how to introduce climate change to various age groups, how to engage students in projects. Initially only a few hundred teachers were trained. Then, the government decided that it wanted to train all the   school teachers in the country, funded by The Ministry of Education. They’ve made huge progress already..

What about other regions?

We’ve yet to find the country that hasn’t embraced the idea of developing more systematic education and training on climate change.  In East Africa we have projects in Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda, in West Africa we are working with Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Niger. . These are all vastly different places, so it takes a lot of time and work. A national project generally takes about 8-12 months to launch and could take 3-5 years to fully implement.

What brings you to the work?

How does the transport sector contribute to both climate change and air pollution, and how can they be tackled simultaneously? 

It’s complicated, and there is no simple answer. Sometimes there is synergy, like when you cut down on fossil fuels or increase energy efficiency in cars, then we can produce benefits for both. Sometimes there is conflict. If we increase burning of biomass or diesel, CO2 emissions go down, but we increase harmful air pollution. That’s why we need to have stronger joint action on and synergies between air quality and climate change.

It’s not always a win-win.

No, but there are occasionally some substantive win-wins. Like with black carbon. It’s one of the prime causes of health problems from air pollution, and it really increases heat absorption. And curbing it is really quite simple, much simpler than curbing CO2 emissions. It’s a main work area at the UNECE. It was recently included in the Gothenburg Protocol under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, which is the only binding agreement that includes obligations to cut particulate matter, including black carbon. We hosted those talks, so they only apply to our region. But it’s a model we would happily export to help other regions.

So does all of your work only apply to the UNECE region?

Not at all. We host the World Forum on Vehicle Regulations. It’s the prime body to address energy efficiency and emissions of vehicles. It’s where the automotive sector and regulators develop the tests to apply to new cars. UNECE also hosts all the inland transport conventions and develops the agricultural and trade standards of the UN, which is driven by delegates from all over the world. It requires coordinated action not only with sectors and countries, but with UN partners.

Can you tell us more about some of those partnerships?

First of all, we have strong partnerships with the other regional commissions. We work across all regions to increase capacity of all member states to improve efficiency in their transport sector. We participate in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which is hosted by UNEP. With WHO we have work on an initiative on Transport, Health and Environment (THE PEP) to promote sustainable transport including cycling and walking. We also work within Sustainable Energy for all, or SE4All, in an initiative for energy efficiency standards in buildings. But I’m looking forward to what happens in the near term. With the energy SDG (#7), the INDCs, and a strong agreement in Paris, the UN system will be forced into much more coordinated and consolidated action to help countries achieve targets. I expect Paris to really push the UN system to come together around a broad and common energy agenda.

What will be a key project in that new agenda for UNECE and its partnerships?

Buildings, for sure. Energy Efficiency in buildings. There are a lot of standards out there, but none are agreed upon internationally. The UNECE is a standard, norm, and convention machine. We will work with partners and our Member States to develop standards for energy efficiency in buildings and to help countries to implement them. This will help countries to reach their INDCs.

Between buildings, transport, and industry, buildings are the most energy intensive, as high as 40%.

NEWS: The latest draft text (December 9) text has kept mention of migration and human mobility in the agreement.

Please join IOM, along with partners the UN High Commission on Refugees, UN University, and the International Labor Organization on December 10 for high-level One UN roundtable that will bring together UN system experts and partners on the interplay between human migration and climate change. Given this issue’s central place in current world affairs—as well as its significant role here at COP21—the discussion is sure to be of urgency and substance. Details can be found here, as well as at the bottom of this post.

IOM joins UNHCR and other partners on the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility to provide negotiators in Paris key recommendations to keep in mind in the run-up to the agreement. More can be found about these here and here (PDF). IOM also wants to stress these key points, for all to take away from Paris:

On climate drivers of mobility:

Environmental and climatic factors are both drivers and pull factors of migration, and are influenced by economic, social, political and demographic aspects. All these different dimensions together define a community and an individual’s resilience and vulnerability.

Mobility strategies of migrants are not inherently “positive” or “negative”. Mobility can save lives, enhance resilience and reduce risk – and it can also make people vulnerable and expose them to new risks.

Talking of migration in the context of climate change means giving a human face to the climate change debate. More emphasis needs to be placed on the migrants themselves, their families and the communities, on understanding their strategies, the challenges they face, and mobility options that are available to them.

On mobility as adaptation strategy:

Individuals and communities use migration to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In some contexts, migration can constitute an important and positive adaptation strategy that can be supported by policy action. Human mobility matters should be factored in the National Adaptation Plans and in adaptation strategies.

The contributions of migrants and diasporas for instance through remittances, knowledge transfers and investments can serve adaptation purposes. The role of migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change can be facilitated.

One UN High Level Side Event: 10 December 2015, 13:15-14:45, Observer room 1, Hall 4

At a recent UN side event here at COP21, these questions were tackled by representatives of the UN’s Rome Based Agencies, along with high-level representatives from partner countries and organizations. The refreshingly unified discussion produced some key messages, summed up succinctly by moderator UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Climate Change, Janos Pasztor:

One-off or piecemeal approaches are not working—what is needed are holistic, integrative, transformative plans;

There is a clear need for more climate finance, particularly toward adaptation and resilience, directed at agriculture. The social and economic benefits of investments to agriculture, after all, produce more returns than almost any other sector;

Transformative leadership is required to do both; currently that does not exist everywhere.

These needs were reinforced by Jose Sebastian Marcucci, Guatemala’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock. Speaking on behalf of his country, as well the other Central American countries, Minister Marcucci reminded the audience that climate change is solely a matter of planning for future impacts—that for many countries it was already a reality, putting serious pressure on the agricultural sector. “Support for farmers to adapt should be immediate,” the Minister said. “But more and more the problem is implementation. For this we require support from partners in the international community.” He highlighted that such adaptation might look like aid, but it is in fact a public good. Food systems do not exist in isolation, after all, and all the gains the world community has made to eradicate hunger are now under threat from a changing climate.

FAO Deputy Director General, Maria Helena Semedo, stressed how essential it is for hunger to be addressed in concert with climate and sustainable development, as they—and their attendant injustices— are all co-structured. Deputy Director General Semedo railed on the siloed, sectoral approaches governments and agencies are currently committed to, naming them as insufficient to contend with the needs of today, not to mention those of the growing population of a planet that is getting hotter.

Changes to consumption and production patterns, reductions to food waste, and increased investment in farmers and nutrition as adaptation were all essential, but nothing embodied the cross-cutting requirements more than support of small-holder farmers, who Semedo pointed out, produce 80% of the world’s food, while being the most vulnerable to climate change. “They are the crucial link,” she said. 

Michel Mordasini, Vice President of the Institute for Agricultural Development (IFAD), echoed Semedo’s call to invest in smallholders. “We need to strengthen the voice of smallholders,” he said. “This means working closer on rural development with communities and local governments to produce mechanisms for resilience. It also means working with local government” to build participatory structures.

“Investing in adaptation and resilience is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do for food security.”

Doing this, according to panelist Elwyn Grainger Jones of the Global Environment Forum, requires a shift to something like ”enhanced direct access,” a way of financing rural projects that respects rural people’s decision making. This is going to be critical if we are to address the vulnerabilities that smallholders disproportionately face.

Among those vulnerabilities, risk of disasters and extreme events is perhaps the most devastating. The World Food Programme’s Richard Choularton emphasized the importance of resilience and preparedness in mitigating the extreme shocks of those disasters, while shoring up our ability to respond. The first step is building tighter bonds with communities and local governments. The fact is, some of the knowledge and best practices for managing risk already lies with communities themselves. Building participatory structures in decision-making is required to harness them.

As critical as smallholders will be, they are only one dimension of the complex set of challenges that we face. Also critical will be getting pricing right, particularly those commodities having outsize effect on the environment and climate—soy, palm oil, and cattle in particular—whose consumption must be reined in. We need to pave the way for private investment while ensuring private interests aren’t the loudest voice at the table. We need to increasingly make our action evidence-based. And we will have to do it all while trying to preserve landscapes and biodiversity. The need to embrace complexity and integrated solutions, seems only a little less obvious than it is daunting.

Examples from the ground of success stories and model programs abound. Every speaker had some. Although as yet agriculture has not made it into the text of the Paris agreement, those successful stories and programs are widespread enough that a vast majority of countries—about 100— included agriculture in their INDCs. Maybe it won’t be mentioned coming out of Paris. But it’s unquestionable that momentum is growing.

While we all await the final language of the Paris agreement, UNISDR and its partners in the UN system are keen to remind negotiators — and anybody else who is watching — that the need for a coherent signal on disaster risk reduction is vital from multiple perspectives. The vulnerable citizens of member states need to know that the world community stands united in watching out for them. Member states themselves need to know that the critical issues facing their societies and economies—for instance developing countries stand to lose as much as 15% of GDP from disasters in the coming years—are a matter of concern for all. And potential streams of finance for disaster risk reduction also await clarity on how to proceed.

What follows are some key messages from the UN Office on Disaster Risk Reduction on what to look out for in Paris.

Perhaps the most vital concern is that there be alignment between the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the Paris agreement. Sendai, which establishes the basis for risk-informed and resilient planning by the world community, was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2015 and is to date the only internationally-agreed-upon operational goal dealing with adaptation. It specifically addresses climate change and climate action, providing measures, guiding principles, and means of implementation. It also establishes clear links and guiding principles for the aligned responses to climate change, disaster risk, and the Sustainable Development Goals—this includes calls for coherence across policies, institutions, indicators, financing, and implementation. In other words, there is a lot to build on in terms of coherence. To read UNISDR’s briefing note to COP21 negotiators, click here.

The UN Plan of Action on Disaster Risk and Resilience, which was adopted system-wide by the High Level Committee on Programs, established disaster risk reduction as a priority area for all UN agencies. It commits the UN system to ensuring that development policies, programming, investments and UN support in all countries are informed by risk assessments. And it requires that UN agencies track their progress on the issue. The UN system, is keeping an eye on what comes out of Paris, with the intention of adapting the UN Plan of Action accordingly.

Here at COP21, displacement and mobility have been a major current of conversation. On opening day, dozens of world leaders connected a changing climate and displacement in their strong messages and challenges to negotiators. Leaders of Small Island Developing States and other vulnerable countries have hammered home their intertwined needs for meaningful mitigation plans, resilience capacity, and, when the time comes, strategies to allow their people to migrate with dignity. And numerous side events have taken up the issue—with more to come next week.  It has been truly striking to observe the presence of this critical issue escalate in significance, even in these first few days.

For 65 years, the UNHCR has led and coordinated global action to protect refugees, help solve challenges caused by human displacement, and facilitate the needs of migrants and the countries that serve them.  Its expertise and work within the UN system—and with partners outside of it—is a critical resource to all stakeholders in displacement worldwide, from the refugees themselves to the countries that embrace them.

In partnership with UN agencies, including the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Development Programme, as well as outside groups like the Norwegian Refugee Council and it’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, and Refugees International, UNHCR has undertaken work as part of the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility, which directs its advice at the UNFCCC process. Bringing together experts on displacement, mobility, and the stresses that underlie them, the goal of the Advisory Group is to speak with a single voice about climate and mobility. This voice—by way of context, research, data, best practices, and policy advice—is primarily directed at the UNFCCC, with the belief that it is the correct mechanism to address human mobility as both an adaptation and mitigation issue.

“We were all working in the same space, and even if we agreed on substantive issues, we did not always appear unified,” says Marine Franck, who coordinates the Advisory Group, and is the Climate Change Officer of UNHCR’s Division of International Protection. “We decided we would be more influential with policy makers if we had a common message. It’s already such a common issue. We wanted to be sure we were coordinated on the vocabulary and the basic messages so that it could enter the UNFCCC process.”

Prior to COP21 in Paris, the Advisory Group made a number of submissions to the UNFCCC for consideration in a Paris agreement. These include a series of recommendations for content to an agreement that would represent meaningful action on climate-change related displacement. The Group asked that negotiators go beyond simply recognizing that climate change-related of displacement will occur. Negotiators should also consider the possibility that safeguards should be adopted to prevent and reduce displacement, that these are in fact critical aspects of adaptation and resilience and can be incorporated in National Adaptation Plans, and that funding for programs to serve the displaced are critical aspects of meaningful adaptation and loss and damage funding mechanisms.