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India

Climate Risk Management [CRM] Framework for India: Addressing Loss and Damage (L&D)

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Globally, weather and climate-related risks, which potentially cause loss and damage, have increased dramatically over the past few decades. The most recent climate projections indicate a significant increase in the frequency, duration and intensity of extreme weather events as well as severe slow-onset climate-related changes. These pose a growing risk to sustainable development of communities and countries. Internationally there is an increasing recognition that adaptation and mitigation may not be enough to manage the impacts of climate change and both climate science and the international climate negotiations stress the urgent need to develop and implement effective climate risk assessment and management approaches in order to avert, minimize and address losses and damages. Specifically, a working definition for Loss and Damage (L&D) by the UNFCCC has been as follows: “Loss and damage refers to negative effects of climate variability and climate change that people have not been able to cope with or adapt to.”

While a number of approaches already exist in the field of short-term risk assessment and management, mainly in the field of extreme events, existing approaches do often not sufficiently address long-term, slow-onset changes due to climate change. Also, risk and vulnerability assessments often do not meet the information needs of policy-makers and local governments in order to manage the risks of climate change and associated losses and damages effectively.

Against this background, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) commissioned the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH with the implementation of the global programme on ‘Risk Assessment and Management for Adaptation to Climate Change’. The programme aims at generating practical guidelines and recommendations on climate risk assessment and effective climate risk management for the international partners of German Development Cooperation worldwide. Better linking climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and the emerging work on how to deal with climaterelated loss and damage at national and local levels as well as integrating these into comprehensive climate risk management approaches is regarded as a key aspect of this work.

This project, cooperating with the BMZ financed project Climate Change Adaptation in Rural Areas of India (CCA RAI) and partnering with KPMG India and IIASA, develops a generic Climate Risk Management (CRM) framework (building on ongoing GIZ applications, such as in Tanzania) that can be utilized to assess and develop various measures at various levels when dealing with large scale climate vulnerabilities as well as residual risks that could contribute towards national loss and damage.

The report sets out a structured process building on a methodological framework to CLIMATE RISK MANAGEMENT (CRM) FRAMEWORK FOR INDIA 2 assess and develop various measures at both national as well as state level and in exemplary fashion and applies this to the context of India as a proof of concept. The aim of the framework and process, in line with one of the goals of the 5 year workplan of the Loss and Damage mechanism to see Loss and Damage being incorporated into global and national policy and practice, is to support national institutions to assess and determine their response to climate-related risks in India.