Focus on early warning-early action systems, insurance, and increasing investment in bid to accelerate climate resilience efforts<\/p>\n
Paris, 30 November\u2014A new initiative to build climate resilience in the world\u2019s most vulnerable countries was launched today by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and 13 members within the UN system at COP21, the Paris Climate Conference.\u00a0 The new initiative will strengthen the ability of countries to anticipate hazards, absorb shocks, and reshape development to reduce climate risks.<\/p>\n
The newly announced initiative, the\u00a0 UN Secretary-General\u2019s Climate Resilience\u00a0 Initiative \u2014 Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape — will help address the needs of the nearly 634 million people, or\u00a0 a tenth of the global population who live in at-risk coastal areas just a few meters above existing sea levels, as well as those living in areas at risk of droughts and floods.\u00a0 The world is now experiencing a strong El Ni\u00f1o event, which could place as many as 4.7 million people at risk from drought in the Pacific alone.<\/p>\n
Bringing together private sector organizations, governments, UN agencies, research institutions and other stakeholders to scale up transformative solutions, the SG\u2019s Resilience Initiative will focus on the most vulnerable people and communities in Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries, and African countries.<\/p>\n
Over the next five years, the Initiative will mobilize financing and knowledge; create and operationalize partnerships at scale, help coordinate activities to help reach tangible results, catalyse research, and develop new tools.<\/p>\n
The Secretary-General\u2019s Climate Resilience<\/p>\n
Initiative will support the work of partners, such as the Africa Risk Capacity, to ensure that by the time the new climate agreement enters into force in 2020,\u00a0 over 30 countries are provided with $2 billion in coverage against drought, flood and cyclones,\u00a0 including $500 million in adaptation financing.\u00a0 150 million Africans will be indirectly insured.<\/p>\n
While much of the attention at Paris is focused on reducing emissions in a bid to keep global temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, many climate impacts will continue to increase\u2014including rising sea level and more extreme weather events\u2014even if greenhouse emissions cease, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.<\/p>\n
A recent report issued by the UN shows that over the last twenty years, 90 per cent of major disasters have been caused by 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and other weather-related events.<\/p>\n
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, \u201cThese are the people who did the least to cause climate change, yet they stand to lose their homes, their jobs, and even their lives because of the growing impacts of climate change.\u00a0 That is why I have asked the UN system to put together a package of initiatives to address this urgent need.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Secretary-General\u2019s Climate Resilience Initiative signals a new era in how the United Nations and its agencies think about our global future,\u00a0 said Dr. Judith Rodin, author of The Resilience Dividend and president of The Rockefeller Foundation, which has made pioneering investments of more than a half-billion dollars to build resilience globally over the past decade. \u201cCrisis is the new normal, and our world demands that we seek solutions that solve multiple problems at once, for the greatest number of people, while strengthening the fabric of their communities, economies, and lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 13 UN entities participating in the Initiative are FAO, UNEP, UNFCCC, UN-Habitat, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNOPS, UNISDR, WFP, OCHA, WHO, and WMO.<\/p>\n
The Secretary-General\u2019s Climate Resilience Initiative brings transformative projects from different agencies in several areas, including for example:<\/p>\n
Early warning systems and preparedness: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN will continue to build on its various early warning systems to ensure early action is triggered to reduce impact on agriculture-based livelihoods and develop comprehensive early warning-early action systems, including for El Ni\u00f1o affected countries.. The World Food Programme will launch FoodSecure, financially and programmatically support community-centred action by using forecast-based financing to enable community resilience building and preparedness before climatic shocks occur. “UNEP currently invests US$20 million annually in supporting Ecosystem-based Adaption in 47 countries as part of its EbA Flagship Programme and will catalyse further action to strengthen EbA as part of overall national adaptation planning.<\/p>\n
Insurance and social protection:\u00a0 WFP and Oxfam America, with support from the reinsurance company Swiss Re, are already helping 31,000 vulnerable rural households increase their food security by integrating disaster risk reduction, micro-insurance, livelihoods diversification, credit and savings into productive safety net programmes.\u00a0\u00a0 Over the next 10 years, the programme aims to reach an additional 500,000 farmers in 10 countries.\u00a0\u00a0 UNEP\u2019s Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), the largest collaboration between the UN and the insurance industry, has a global membership approaching 100 organizations, including insurers representing 20% of world premium and US$14 trillion in assets. PSI will create a Sustainable Insurance Policy Forum to scale up policy progress by insurance regulators in addressing climate and sustainability risks.<\/p>\n
Decision making: To better build physical and natural infrastructure,\u00a0 UNOPS launched Resilience Pathways, a tool to help countries integrate resilience planning across multiple sectors of their hard and soft infrastructure. It will be progressively implemented across 30 countries by 2020. UN Habitat is currently leading an initiative to help build urban resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. UN-Habitat is leading a global resilience initiative, the City Resilience Profiling Programme to build resilience of the most vulnerable urban populations. The Agency also deployed the CityRap tool in African cities to train city officials to produce their own City Resilience Action Plans in Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar, Cape Verde, S\u00e3o Tom\u00e9 e Pr\u00edncipe, Guinea Bissau and the Union of Comoros.\u00a0 At least 300-400 municipal officials will be trained and the tool will concern at least half a million people cumulatively until mid 2016.<\/p>\n
The private sector also has an important role to play, for example, Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Working Group, launched by Siguler Guff & Co., will mobilize private sector investment in climate adaptation and resilience.\u00a0 The Working Group is evaluating the potential for a $1 billion investment vehicle that could invest in both developed and developing countries around climate adaptation and resilience.\u00a0 ING has committed to allocate at least 20 per cent of the proceeds from the issuance of a five-year EUR 500 million and three-year US$800 million green bond to fund new projects, including for resilience.<\/p>\n
Governments also pledged support to the initiative. Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, \u2018We need to strengthen the resilience of people if we want them to develop. We therefore fully support the Secretary General\u2019s Climate Resilience Initiative and are proud to contribute. The Netherlands will support better decision making and national dialogues on resilience through the ‘Partners for Resilience’ programme.’<\/p>\n
Media contacts:
\nSecretary-General\u2019s Climate Change Support Team\/UN DPI:\u00a0 Dan Shepard, t: 1-646 675-3286, e: shepard@un.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UN Secretary-General\u2019s Initiative Aims to Strengthen Climate Resilience of the World\u2019s Most Vulnerable Countries and People<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,19,20,25,16,17,4,30,29],"tags":[472,144,5037,4857],"class_list":["post-12457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-financing-for-development","category-cities","category-climate-change","category-partnerships","category-economic-growth","category-infrastructure","category-news","category-secretary-general","category-sustainable-development-agenda","tag-ban-ki-moon","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-resilience-initiative","tag-resilience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/230"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}