Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing the World Bank Group ...

CHAPTER 3CLIMATE VARIABILITYbetween the four institutions involved in early warnings, which continued to operate inisolation from one another.3.91 Maintenance continues to be a problem. Only four of the 12 closed Africanprojects reported attention to maintenance and only in the Senegal River Basin did theself-evaluation report consider sustainability to be likely.3.92 Automated systems would seem to be one solution 41 —but experience so far hasnot been encouraging. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned thatautomated equipment is not necessarily cheaper or more reliable than humanobservers. 42 Two recent experiences bear this out. The new project in Central Asia foundthat automated equipment from a prior project could not be maintained, due tooperating conditions, lack of staff capacity, and difficulty in getting spare parts.Consequently, the project invested more heavily in traditional manual instrumentation.Second, the World Bank helped finance the Weather Information for All Initiative,which proposed an innovative solution for Africa in partnership with private sectortelecommunications companies. They sought to add weather stations to cell phonetowers, solving power, connectivity, and security problems. However, the nonprofitcoordinating agency went bankrupt, and only 19 of the 5,000 planned stations had beenerected by 2011.3.93 Ultimately though, supply is not enough. Unlocking strong demand for weather,hydrological, and climate info is necessary in order to sustain the political will tomaintain hydromet services.Dealing with Climate Variability: Conclusions3.94 There is a large unfinished agenda in closing the adaptation gap: increasingpeople’s resilience to current levels of climate variability. Sustainable land and watermanagement and the expansion of efficient irrigation can fight poverty and improveagriculturalists’ resilience. So, too, can disaster risk management, including droughtmitigation and relief. These agendas overlap with what has been considered sustainabledevelopment.3.95 A key question is the extent to which these activities also promote adaptation tolong-term climate change. Agroclimatic zones are shifting, so techniques that areadaptive today may not be suitable 20 years hence. Population growth and migrationare exposing more people to climate risks, potentially counteracting progress in riskreduction. The next section assesses how consideration of long-term climate change canbe factored into decision making in policies and investment, and looks at nascentexperience in doing so.60