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

CHAPTER 3CLIMATE VARIABILITYand none were unsatisfactory. Even in the cases where institutional or other challengesmeant that project objectives were not achieved, the physical construction works wereoften completed successfully.3.56 “Soft” risk reduction and exposure reduction measures can be successful whenwell designed. For example, a series of Water Quality and Control Project implementedin Brazil over 1992-2011 successfully reduced vulnerability to floods in Curitiba and SãoPaulo through a combination of physical flood control infrastructure and by creatingdedicated ribbons of green spaces in the flood banks by the river (World MeteorologicalOrganization and Global Water Partnership 2004).3.57 Sustainability of flood protection is threatened by poor maintenance. For example,an urban environmental and sanitation project in Ghana constructed a set of storm drainsthat reduced flood risk in Accra, but an IEG evaluation three years later noted thatmaintenance had been poor and that the primary five-meter drain had already filled withtwo meters of silt (IEG 2006a). A coastal embankment project in Bangladesh wasgenerally successful in rehabilitating embankments and introduced a number of newdesign innovations, but sustainability was thought to be unlikely as sufficient resourcesfor maintenance were not available. In a Belize project, inadequate maintenance andunregulated construction blocked the drains after just four years (Box 3-5).Box 3-5. Two Half Drains Are Not as Good as One Whole OneA project sought to alleviate chronic flooding in six coastal Belizean towns. Because ofmacroeconomic constraints on lending, only half the needed funds were available. Rather thanscale the project down, the government elected to spread the funds among all the towns,resulting in completion of only 49 percent of the planned works. While construction quality wasgood, flooding continued—in four cases, severely. The reasons: the partial systems wereineffective; the towns did not have funds for maintenance so drainage was often blocked; andbuildings were allowed to encroach on the open storm drains. Unregulated development hasfurther exacerbated flooding.Source:(IEG 2008).3.58 The rushed nature of emergency response projects makes them particularlyvulnerable to design and institutional problems. In the wake of a disaster, emergencyrecovery projects often take advantage of heightened awareness of risks to galvanizeprevention of future catastrophes. But emergency projects may not have sufficient timeto design, or get political buy-in for, the institutional reforms necessary to achievepreventive actions—as in the case of the Cambodia Flood Emergency RehabilitationProject. Rushed planning in emergency projects can also lead to poor design decisions,as in Honduras and Turkey. And some emergency projects that have attempted to setup more complex mechanisms have failed. (See Appendix I2 for details.)50