Credibility in Climate Resilience Claims: Scratch & Sniff!

Greetings!

The month before the UNFCCC COP is frequently a period of major announcements and program launches for adaptation and resilience policies and projects. My inbox feels quite full of such news at the moment, and I anticipate a busy schedule from now through 18 November, when the COP is scheduled to end.

A natural question for all of these announcements is if they are significant, important, and/or useful. Especially since the number of water institutions that will attend COP is increasing rapidly, it’s worth having some sort of framework to evaluate these. And such a framework may even be useful if you or your institution are preparing an announcement or launch and plan on making some claims with reference to water and climate issues. Claims should be based on evidence.

Why should we care about the validity of climate change claims? Perhaps the most important reason for me is that I want people to take climate adaptation and resilience seriously, and if we make false claims of attribution and impact, we cheapen our influence and credibility. How can you have hope if the projects you see don’t work? Worse, one weak adaptation project may be taking away funding tied to climate change that could go to a better project.

I know of no standard scorecard for judging these claims. But some issues seem clear for consideration:

  • What is the implicit definition of adaptation and/or resilience in the work being proposed? If the implicit definition is to go back to the conditions that existed more or less as they were before a disturbance or stressor, be very skeptical about anything else in the proposal. The most simple and disturbing aspect of climate change is that the future, even the near future, will not be like the past. The insight that we need to get ready for additional, often uncertain change, is important to embody.

  • Does the person or institution making the claims have a background running, implementing, or managing climate adaptation and resilience programs or projects? Climate science is not the same as climate adaptation — indeed, these fields are even in some tension with one another. Do I want an oncologist running my MRI? No — those are different bodies of knowledge, even if they need each other. Do you see evidence of a track record and serious engagement in designing adaptation projects? Did they also finish those projects? How well did they work?

  • Are the suggested interventions different in any way from actions that might have been suggested 10 or 20 years ago? Would someone in 1990 (or 2010) find this to be a fairly standard and comprehensible project? Many water efficiency programs, for instance, or early warning disaster systems programs have been suggested for decades but their justification has changed even if their project designs have not. Simply changing the justification is not changing the project! These are perhaps best described as projects that enable adaptation to climate rather than adaptation to climate change. Long-standing “best practices” for water management such as data transparency or IWRM do not automatically produce meaningful climate adaptation benefits. Building a dike for flood control purposes is not necessarily providing some additional benefit related to new or expected climate impacts. Traditional WASH projects may help with social resilience in the short term, but they may not help with hydrological resilience if conditions change, thereby undermining the social benefits. Indeed, if a project does not include room for modification, adjustment, flexible operation, or even removal as conditions evolve over time, then these investments are probably very climate-stationary and restricting or limiting future climate adaptation options. I personally consider such claims around efficiency, sharing, transparency, or monitoring untested adaptation hypotheses unless I can see evidence otherwise. Especially for infrastructure projects, an estimate of how climate change is modifying the system itself and showing an adaptation effect from that piece of infrastructure on that impact is likely to be convincing.

  • How far into the future does the project look? Does it extend to the operational lifetime of a physical asset? Does it provide guidance on when this solution will no longer provide an adaptation benefit? What happens then?

  • Are the claims of climate relevance expressed as direct or indirect benefits? For instance, many traditional nature conservation projects that reduce overfishing, control nutrients, and enhance recharge are now being described as climate adaptation projects, when the “benefit” in terms of climate change is really just allowing the ecosystem a little more time to adjust and renormalize. At best, this is a co-benefit, with little clear guidance even for resource managers for when it will cease to be useful. They may be perfectly good projects, but the climate benefit is probably only marginal.

  • Is the relative influence of climate change to other drivers being considered and prioritized? Often the answer to this question is also useful in distinguishing between the need for direct, substantive benefits vs co-benefits. Land-use change such as deforestation may be a much bigger influence on runoff and thus flooding than climate change per se. A clear sense of relative strength is a sign of careful analysis and truth in advertising.

  • Is there evidence that the decision making processes that are being targeted will look different as a result of adaptation interventions? Many years ago, I heard a staffer at a development bank state that a retroactive analysis of their new climate risk screening tool showed that all of the investments for the decade previous to the launch of the tool were highly resilient. This, they asserted, was a sign that it was a great tool. A colleague from another development bank said, “If they all still look like good projects, that’s a sign of a crappy tool.” I was inclined to agree with her! If you have a meaningful tool, then you should be able to see significant changes in how projects are developed, implemented, managed, and evaluated. They will look different, because they are addressing new issues.

Perhaps the most important issue when listening to a new proposed project is to consider what problem is being described and if the suggested intervention is on a scale that measures up to that problem. Tools normally just do one or two things well. A saw can’t fix everything that a wrench can, and the saw shouldn’t try.

Why do these issues matter? AGWA is a professional organization and network. Our credibility as professionals rests on our ability to distinguish between good and bad adaptation and resilience projects, programs, and policies — and to be honest if we are not sure or need more information.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA

John MatthewsComment