Climate change is causing a redefinition of the process of development.
In the past, development was seen as various approaches to increasing the wealth of nations and the quality of lives of people in those nations, giving them more opportunities in terms of jobs, healthcare, housing, education, and other life processes. Official development assistance (ODA) from richer to poorer nations is meant to assist this process. Occasionally, the development process is interrupted by disasters such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, events the management of which was left to professionals outside the development field.
Climate change is already causing a great many more of these disasters, especially in the forms of minor windstorms, floods, and dry spells that do not make the press, even in the nations in which they happen, but nonetheless disrupt people’s abilities to maintain decent livelihoods.

The international Commission on Climate Change and Development, which published its report in May, 2009, found evidence of this syndrome as it made field visits to Cambodia, Mali, and Bolivia, in each case visiting villages in the remote countryside.

This led the Commission to two major conclusions. First, climate change is going to require a new form of development, one that manages risks and decreases vulnerability. Second, adapting to climate change is going to be done mainly by individuals, families and villages.

New forms of development

The new type of development required is, essentially, sustainable development, meeting the needs of present in ways that do not increase the vulnerability of future generations. 
Development that can be sustained amid a changing climate must be enabled by building the adaptive capacity of people and defining appropriate technical adaptive measures. Adaptive capacity results from reduced poverty and human development. Adaptive measures require the institutional infrastructure that development brings. Action must be fast, scaled, focused and integrated across sectoral divides:
Speed: Wasting no time: climate change is happening faster than science predicted.
Scale: Growing numbers of people are in danger; responses must match the scale of this change.
Focus: Managing risks, building the resilience of the poorest, and enhancing the ecosystem functions upon which they depend.
Integration: Uniting environment, development and climate change, managing synergies between mitigation and adaptation.

One critical input to this new development process will be the production and dissemination of appropriate climate information, tailored to end user needs and delivered in a timely manner, particularly in developing countries.
Institutions at all levels have important responsibilities in this. Local institutions should ensure that dissemination of climate information reaches the poorest and most vulnerable through appropriate extension services. National governments need to invest more in climate and meteorological information, biophysical monitoring, and early warning, integrating such data in their planning. Regional organizations need to become more innovative in helping developing countries produce regional climate information and knowledge.
At the international level, an improved knowledge network is required where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, together with other institutions, including World Meteorological Organization, disseminate climate knowledge in a rapid and regular manner to developing countries. And all of this is needed immediately.

People first
At the beginning of its work, the commission had assumed that it would be able to narrowly define adaptation to climate change in ways that would separate it from the general development process.

This has been a goal of the UN Framework Conventional on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat itself, which wrote in a 2008 technical paper on funding adaptation and mitigation: “An increased effort to calculate adaptation needs through regional or national bottom-up assessments, as opposed to global top-down estimates, is evident. But regardless of the number of financial assessments, their precision can be improved only through a better understanding of adaptation and how it is additional to a development baseline.”

However, the Commission concluded that, while such efforts to calculate adaptation needs are helpful, especially by bottom-up assessments, it is essentially impossible to separate adaptation from development.

While infrastructure such as new seawalls, dykes, and irrigation systems will be needed, the real adaptation needs are for education, data, and knowledge; for democratic governance and political voices to articulate views and concerns; for effective local governments efficiently connected to national governments. People also need markets that work for them so that they can trade and build their assets to tide them through illness, bad harvests and the smaller, more local disasters that they are experiencing more of. The needs are basically the goals of development.

Many of these needs must be met at the level of people and their families and villages. So much work on climate change, even on adaptation, is done at the level of global models and surveys. Our Commission attempted to turn this approach “upside-down,” and to encourage institutions to begin at the local level.

In its travels, the Commission found that climate change does not happen in isolation. It accompanies threats such as rising energy and food crises, rapidly changing markets for produce and labor, and the current global economic slowdown. However, development that decreases vulnerability to climate change also decreases vulnerability to these and all other threats.

The challenge of new thinking

The concept that development and adaptation overlap one another so widely provides several challenges for the international community. The development process has traditionally had trouble reaching the poor, the food-insecure and those without access to modern forms of energy; so making it more complex by bringing in the issue of risk does not inspire confidence.

Also, the development community and the disaster risk reduction community tend to operate separately. Their fields of endeavor must now be at least aligned, if not merged. 

There is also the issue of “additionality.” Developing countries want the wealthier countries to honor the UNFCCC and help them with adaptation costs; they see this not as charity but as a debt, a reparation, owed them by the nations that developed on the basis of carbon emissions. They do not want this debt to become entangled with the broken promises and the charitable nature of official development assistance.

Also, the focus on the local level does not in any way decrease the role of the national government. It suggests instead that national governments must be much better at connecting with remote areas and peoples. We saw examples of how this is being done through partnerships with NGOs and UN organizations.

However, we also saw a tendency in some countries for national governments to decentralize responsibilities to local communities – for things like schools and health clinics – without decentralizing the funds to do so or seeing to it that local leaders were trained for the tasks. This tendency increases, rather than decreases, vulnerability.

The instinct to rely on local people is correct, for they have been managing climate variability for centuries and have much pertinent knowledge and many necessary skills. This knowledge must be gathered, organized and used in government policies. 

Managing risks

Seeing adaptation as development with risk management and seeing the development process from a local angle is causing thoughtful governments to take new approaches.

Bangladesh, which has suffered a succession of cyclones, storms, and floods, has developed a national action plan uniting the areas of agriculture, health, livelihoods, disasters management, environment, and development – including 50 subsectors of those areas. A trust fund has also been established to receive and allocate funding between sectors.

After four years of severe droughts (1999–2002), Tunisia gathered national and regional climate data, studied the potential effects of climate change on the nation, reoriented away from short-term crisis management to a long-term adaptation strategy, and established an intersectoral climate council that brought together the ministries of agriculture, environment, and cooperation. It is setting up an information system on agriculture, water, environment, tourism, and health.

Bolivia has developed a National Mechanism for Climate Change Adaptation covering five sectoral programs (water resources, food security, health, human settlement and risk management, and ecosystems) and three cross-sectoral programs (scientific research, capacity building and education, and anthropologic aspects and traditional knowledge). This mechanism is based on preliminary vulnerability assessments with different climate change scenarios, participatory consultations, and evaluation of adaptation needs. It is incorporated into the 2006–2010 National Development Plan.
Development with risk management also changes the emphasis in the ways that different sectors – water, energy, health, etc – are managed.
For example, water management needs to be improved at all administration levels. At the regional level, the focus should be on defining transboundary water management arrangements, a particular challenge in the Middle Eastern region.
Water is best managed in terms of its basin or catchment area, and these rarely correspond with political or administrative boundaries. About 40% of people live within the basins of international rivers, and about 90% of people live in countries that share these basins. Transboundary water management is costly and resource-intensive but can yield tremendous benefits, not only in terms of decreasing risks of floods and shortages, but also in terms of decreasing risks of regional conflicts.

Internationally, the donor community needs to reorient its financial assistance toward supporting countries in water management actions to increase water’s contribution to development in the context of risk and change. Key areas include support for the development of hydrological monitoring systems and public goods that are unlikely to appeal to commercial investors, such as infrastructure for flood control.

Development requires widespread access to electricity, but mitigating climate change requires moving away from electricity generation based on fossil fuels such as coal. Yet energy access issues tend to be separated from climate mitigation and adaptation issues.

Recent research has shown that burning biofuels such as firewood, crop residues, and dung may be more damaging to the climate than using a carbon-based fuel like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). LPG is also healthier in that it causes less indoor air pollution; its use does not tax forests or other ecosystems, and it does not have to be laboriously gathered and hauled. Some governments have successfully encouraged shifts from firewood to LPG.

Renewable energy offers all nations, industrial and developing, the opportunity decrease greenhouse gas emissions while moving toward decentralized energy self-sufficiency.

Reforming institutions

Much has been written about the need to reform the international governance architecture, which was erected by the victors of World War Two and has changed little since. These institutions do not reflect current political realities, particularly the growing strength of the emerging economies.

Climate change makes the need for reform more urgent. Mitigation will require unparalleled international cooperation – cooperation that sets standards and rules that reach into the daily lives of billions.

Adaptation will require new forms of coordinated cooperation between rich and poor nations but also forms of governance that reach seamlessly up and down among local, national, regional, and international levels to accelerate resilient development.
International, regional, national, and local institutions must all help to organize and coordinate adaption at the local level. Examples exist of systems that stretch across these interfaces. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has stretched from the international level down into villages, helping to strengthen national and regional health systems and, while doing so, to integrate its work into national health plans and Poverty Reduction Plans.

Adaptation covers virtually all elements of national government activity: finance, planning, agriculture, water management, health, safety, disasters, infrastructure, food security, and so on. Effective action requires coordination between these sectors, something that will only be achieved if all areas of government dealing with adaptation are led and coordinated from the highest political and organizational level. This is true for industrial as well as developing countries.

Developing-country governments in particular need to blend and coordinate development, environment, poverty reduction, and disaster risk reduction activities, such as the national platforms for disaster reduction initiated through the Hyogo Framework for Action; the institutions and efforts of the Rio Conventions on Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Desertification; and the national efforts aligned to all of these, such as the National Adaptation Programs of Action.

The Commission believes thatnational governments must strive to overcome the policy incoherence that exists both nationally and internationally by systematically promoting mutually reinforcing policy actions across government departments and agencies, creating synergies to help achieve defined objectives.
As noted earlier, the affects of climate change do not occur in a vacuum. While developing nations must adapt to a changing climate, they must also develop.

Lord Nicholas Stern’s noted that  “development and climate change are the central problems of the 21st Century. If the world fails on either, it will fail on both. Climate change undermines development. No deal on climate change which stalls development will succeed.”