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

ENDNOTES22 In Ethiopia, communities were offered a choice of development projects, and more thanhalf chose some form of SLWM. In Zambia, 35% of project participants adoptedconservation farming, boosting yields by 25% (Program Against Malnutrition 2005).23 The impact evaluation compared outcomes of households receiving five years of supportwith comparable households receiving one year of support. A household was consideredfood-insecure if it could not satisfy its food needs for five or more days in a month.24 Precursor projects dated to the mid-1980s and included the Emergency Drought Recoveryproject of 1993.25 In 2007, 0.9% of the value of global agricultural output was covered by insurance; 2.3% inhigh income countries, 0.3% for upper middle income countries, 0.2% for lower middleincome countries and 0.0% for low income countries. (Mahul and Stutley 2010)26 Climate disasters are defined here as droughts, floods, storms, heat waves, cold wavesand landslides.27 The 2006 evaluation found that at the project level, objectives had mainly focused onshort-term fixes and had rarely addressed the root causes of the disastrous impacts ofnatural hazards. The short term focus had been driven in part because disaster preventionmeasures had been tied to disaster response projects, and because disaster response projectswere often implemented through the Emergency Recovery Loan (ERL) instrument, whichhad a short planning period and a maximum 3 year implementation period.28 This period follows the adoption of the Hyogo Framework in 2005, the IEG evaluation of2006 and the creation of GFDRR in 2006. It is possible that a general shift in internationalawareness of the importance of risk reduction measures--reinforced by the South Asiatsunami of 2004, one of the worst disaster events in history--has been the driving forcebehind these events and the observed change in behavior in the Bank. This evaluation couldnot determine attribution for this change.29 These projects were identified by a keyword search of project appraisal documents for“mangrove,” followed by a manual examination. A further 9 projects remain active. In allcases the mangrove planting was a small part of a larger project, often with conservation,forest management, disaster response, or disaster risk management objectives30 Dasgupta and Blankespoor World Bank. 2010b. Economics of Adaptation to ClimateChange – Ecosystem Services. Washington, DC, The World Bank. use GIS data to examinethe degree to which mangroves are threatened by sea level rise. They find that 69% ofmangrove coastline in developing countries would have the ability to migrate inland from a1 meter sea-level rise, 22% would be threatened but might be able to migrate, and 9% wouldbe blocked from migration by topography—but that this 9% covers 28% of the population inmangrove-protected areas and 41% of the GDP.”31 The Ministries of Finance and Agriculture have expressed interest in the index insuranceproduct; they may purchase the index insurance product as a means of providing funds thatcan then be used to pay for reconstruction of government assets or social protectionmeasures for farmers, respectively, in the event of flood, earthquake or drought.145