Tag: Least developed countries

CAN Submission - National Adaptation Plans - August 2011

Overall, it is important that decisions in Durban set out and elaborate on an international process that will enable LDCs to formulate andimplement national adaptation plans, clearly articulating the role, responsibility and functions that the UNFCCC will offer, support and facilitate;

Elements in the run-up to Durban, such as the NAP expert meeting and the LEG paper on mid- and long-term adaptation planning, provide an important opportunitiy to prepare such a decision and should be used in a focused manner;

Given past experience, the specific form and format of national adaptation plans and strategies should be decided by each country, whether to create a stand alone plan as a complement or to incorporate the ‘elements of national adaptation planning’ into existing strategic plans;

The Cancún Adaptation Framework (paragraph 12, 1/CP.16) manifests important guiding principles which have to be further concretised in order to be applied in national planning processes.

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Estimating least-developed countries’ vulnerability to climate-related extreme events over the next 50 years - 2010

 

When will least developed countries be most vulnerable to climate change, given the influence of projected socio-economic development? The question is important, not least because current levels of international assistance to support adaptation lag more than an order of magnitude below what analysts estimate to be needed, and scaling up support could take many years. In this paper, we examine this question using an empirically derived model of human losses to climate-related extreme events, as an indicator of vulnerability and the need for adaptation assistance. We develop a set of 50-year scenarios for these losses in one country, Mozambique, using high-resolution climate projections, and then extend the results to a sample of 23 least-developed countries. Our approach takes into account both potential changes in countries’ exposure to
climatic extreme events, and socio-economic development trends that influence countries’ own adaptive capacities. Our results suggest that the effects of socio-economic development trends may begin to offset rising climate exposure in the second quarter of the century, and that it is in the period between now and then that vulnerability will rise most quickly. This implies an urgency to the need for international assistance to finance adaptation. 
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