19 December 2019, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The recently launched Economics of Climate Adaptation (ECA) project had its inception workshop in Ethiopia this week. Ethiopia is one of the project’s pilot countries, alongside Honduras and Vietnam. The project’s focus in Ethiopia is a drought analysis in rural areas in the Afar and Somali Regions, with the goal of being able to support decision makers in identifying the adaptation measures which carry the best cost/benefit scenario.

Stakeholders from the local as well as federal government, academia, and international organizations met with UNU in Addis Ababa to gain a common understanding of the data-intensive methodology and to discuss the scope of the study based on the people’s needs.

The overall objective of the ECA project is to analyze, based on scientific models, which specific climate change adaptation (CCA) measures are most cost- efficient in reducing climate-related losses and damages while taking climate and socio-economic scenarios into account. As such, ECA supports decision-makers in developing and quantifying their national or regional climate adaptation strategies including risk transfer instruments.

“We strongly believe that 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,” stated Dr. Maxime Souvignet, the project lead at UNU-EHS. “This requires identifying cost-efficient CCA measures, in a transparent and structured manner, to identify which future investments would be sustainable.”

This approach requires a comprehensive climate risk analysis. A large number of approaches has already been designed to respond to the complexity and the uncertainty of climate change related risks, but none has fully integrated processes from risk assessment to feasibility of CCA measures.

The ECA studies, based on the Economics of Climate Adaptation (ECA) approach, bridge this gap and offer a systematic, transparent, and open-source approach that fosters 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.

The ECA studies are funded by the German development bank KfW through the Insuresilience Solutions Fund (ISF). The ECA studies are implemented in Ethiopia, Honduras and Vietnam.

Source: UNU-EHS