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

STATEMENT OF THE EXTERNAL ADVISORY PANELconstraints and existing in-country activities. The IEG report is appropriatelystructured around the key priorities identified in the adaptation literature andincreasingly adopted in adaptation practice. They are:• A focus on win-win adaptations that reduce vulnerability to both current climatevariability and future climate change. Most measures under this heading are closelylinked to development and as such familiar to the Bank. They address existingadaptation gaps, for example on disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction,micro-insurance, water management and agricultural practices. It is also worthrecalling that fundamental development assistance on literacy, education, health andpoverty eradication tends to be associated with higher adaptive capacity and lowervulnerability to climate change.• An awareness of climate risks in strategic decisions that, if not effectivelyimplemented, may lock in adverse vulnerability profiles for the long term. Examplesinclude planning decisions (e.g. on development in hazard zones), investmentdecisions (e.g. in climate sensitive activities like agriculture) and infrastructuredesign (e.g., the siting of roads). The requirement is not to climate-proof all theseinvestments upfront. Given the high degree of uncertainty about future climateoutcomes this is not possible. But decisions need to be climate-aware, rational in theface of potential climate risk and able to respond when those risks materialize.Decision-making should also be as robust as possible to enable flexible and resilientadaptive management over time.Tellingly, the IEG report has much more to say about the first issue, dealing withcurrent vulnerability. On this it provides a wealth of information on the Bank’sperformance and makes concrete recommendations on how operationalperformance might be improved. This is where the Bank’s comparative advantage asa development institution lies. We support the conclusions drawn in the report, forexample on the importance of financial sustainability in adaptation schemes(including for maintenance), the challenge of setting up sound institutions, the riskof inadvertent maladaptation, and the broad (but not universal) value of financialproducts for risk management.IEG’s recommendations on the second issue, strategic positioning, are moreconceptual, less detailed and less well grounded in operations. This reflects the factthat climate-aware, robust decision-making in areas such as land planning andinfrastructure design is still rare, not just in the Bank but the developmentcommunity in general (and indeed in advanced countries also). Yet, the report isright to call for more strategic thinking in selecting anticipatory adaptation projects.Apart from a few transnational (e.g. basin-level water management) programs,xvi