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

MANAGEMENT RESPONSEare. The Bank will thus draw on the lessons learned from the various Expert Teams—Water,Disaster Risk Management, and Adaptation—to explore effective processes to provide the necessaryexpertise and assistance as strategies and projects move from concept/design to implementation.Such processes could include increasing the scope of the expert teams and more systematic use ofsouth-south knowledge sharing to help get the right expertise at the right time to project teams onthe ground. Management recognizes that the work will require additional financial resources andexpertise; efforts will be made to mobilize these. To bring best knowledge and expertise intooperations, the Bank will also explore partnerships with leading international institutions.Management also accepts the need for indicators that can measure improvement in resiliencythrough pilots that focus on changes at institutional and household levels, and in biophysicalcharacteristics of an area, community, or country. Working with the new World DevelopmentReport (WDR) on Risk and Uncertainty, the Bank will develop methodologies and processes tocapture intermediate and long-term outcomes. However, management will need to carefully considerits commitments in response to this recommendation. There is a clear need to mobilize extraresources to develop needed methodologies, collect the baseline data, and select the pilots to testthem.Management partially accepts the recommendation to pilot approaches to better assess the costs,benefits, sustainability, and impact of activities with presumed resilience benefits. Managementrecognizes the importance of being able to quantitatively demonstrate both the costs and benefits ofadaptation actions. The Bank will build on the Economics of Adaptation work which included aglobal study and 11 case studies in various partner countries. This work highlighted manymethodological issues and data needs involved in assessing the costs and benefits of adaptation.Assuming that funding can be mobilized and partnerships developed to help address thesechallenges, the Bank will apply the knowledge to specific pilots designed to provide additionallearning on costs, benefits, impacts, and sustainability of resilient development activities.Management agrees that it is important to support countries to improve the quality and use ofhydromet services and encourage the sharing of hydromet information within and betweencountries. There is a clear need to capture the translation of data into information through productsand services that can lead to measurable actions to reduce the risks to people and assets. The Bank’sfocus would therefore be on delivering clear, locally tailored messages to end-users at regional,national, or local levels. Examples could include services that improve decisions for resiliency in theshort- and long-term, such as early warning systems for climate related disaster risk management,area planning, provision of services critical for sustaining economic growth (e.g. information for civilaviation or offshore oil production). Management believes that there is a need to explore howexisting data (national or global) can be made more accessible and be used more effectively indecision-making. One of the major challenges is to ensure that there is sustained financial support toboth generate and use the data and information. This would require exploring various fundingmodels, including budgetary support, public-private partnership, and “open data” initiatives (at theregional or national level) to improve the use of the information at all levels. There is also someinternational work that has been started to make existing satellite data and short-term forecastsavailable as a public good to countries that would not have the capacity or the funding to have theirown early-warning or forecasting systems. The Bank’s initial work would thus include identifyingpartners and resources and developing the process to cost-effectively and sustainably implement thisrecommendation in LICs and MICs.xxxi