Toolkit for Integrating Climate Change Adaptation into Development Projects
“Development” is about increasing goods and services, increasing access and opportunities, increasing freedom and choices, and sustaining these gains over time. Climate change can undermine or, in some cases, reverse the effectiveness and sustainability of development interventions. What’s more, some interventions can unintentionally leave people even more vulnerable than before to worsening droughts and floods, changing rainfall patterns, sealevel rise and other impacts of climate change. Conversely, welldesigned development activities can increase people’s resilience to these impacts.
It is, therefore, critical to integrate, or “mainstream” thinking about climate change into development strategies, plans and programmes. This is especially true when pursuing goals that are most likely to be affected by the impacts of climate change, such as greater access to safe drinking water, healthy ecosystems or food security.
This Toolkit offers practical, “how to” guidance for integrating climate change adaptation into the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development projects. Its step-bystep structure helps users build climate-resilient projects with sustainable impacts. The Toolkit also includes simple checklists to ensure that development activities don’t increase people’s vulnerability to climate change. It provides guidance and recommended tools for all stages of the project cycle, as well as tools, resources and practical examples from CARE projects around the world. Water resource management and agriculture projects are specifically highlighted, as they were targeted in the early tests of the Toolkit.
This interactive Toolkit is designed to be flexible. Users can tailor the process to meet their needs, priorities and available resources. Furthermore, we see the Toolkit as a ‘living’ document or resource. We welcome feedback on its structure, content and overall utility from users. We intend to update the Toolkit periodically as we receive this feedback and continue to learn more about the process of integrating adaptation into development projects.
View and download the material here.
