‘Tacloban Declaration': From where to where?

This is my response to the ‘Tacloban Declaration' (TD) initiative that the President of Philippines Mr. Benigno Aquino III has embarked upon to address disaster risk reduction based on the experience of Haiyan.

The President of Philippines Mr. Benigno Aquino III has embarked upon a timely but ambitious initiative of coming up with a ‘Tacloban Declaration' to address disaster risks as an outcome of Asia-Europe Meeting Manila Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management which has just finished in Manila (4-6 June 2014).

Going by the face value, we should judge this initiative as a very good one, probably the first time ever a developing Asian country thought of coming up with a major declaration addressing disaster risks. Traditionally, it has always been Japan which has taken leadership among Asian countries when it comes to either environmental initiatives or disaster risk reduction or climate change. The president’s initiative is also very timely considering that the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) will expire in 2015. However, probably this is where the gala of praise ends.

The Conference Center in Kobe where the HFA took a shape in 2005

.       Who are the Players: The major question raises is the critical mass that is required to launch an initiative like this. At ASEM 2015, what we are looking at is a small fraction of the World DRR experts participating in this venture (around 150 government officials, academics and policy makers) compared to the broad representation based on which the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) was designed. Long preparation, credibility of the forum etc. made HFA distinctive and appealing. When HFA was drafted, the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction was attended by hundreds of practitioners, government officials and academics engaged in DRR representing most countries. For example, the WCDR 2005 consisted of intergovernmental segment participated by nearly 160 governments, thematic segments and public forum and the discussions from all these segments were culminated into what is called HFA. So, to replace HFA, we need equally or more thorough process.

2.       History matters but it has more to it: HFA was built upon the Yokohama strategy (1994) which was more of guidelines for natural disaster preparedness, prevention and mitigation and focused on enhancing national and local capabilities to manage and reduce risk. The Yokohama Strategy taught us a lesson that such processes require greater involvement of local communities in all aspects of DRR, scarcity of resources from development budgets etc. As a consequence, what HFA did was to address all the lessons that YS has taught us. This takes me to my next observation.

3.       The devil is in the details: Now, I am saying this without much details on how ASEM will handle in terms of bringing in all the experiences we had since 2005, what would be the coverage of this declaration (or regional or global) and what preparations have gone into it including considering consultations that are already happening for feeding into designing the post-HFA process. The UNISDR has already started online consultations and has already come up with several thematic papers to inputs to design the post-HFA mechanism. It would be good to know if ASEM has already taken these inputs into consideration for coming up with the declaration.

4.       It is players again: Even if a well worded TD comes out of the ASEM 2015, what is the guarantee that it will be adopted by all the nation states and what would be its status under UN? What about the needed finances? Would TD be able to secure needed finances to push its agenda or it will remain as yet another declaration?

5.       Where we want to see the declaration going? As for me, I strongly believe that the Tacloban Declaration be supportive of the post-HFA process, contribute to it rather than duplicate it and help in pulling consensus for coming up with a strong and effective post-HFA process? Did the president had this in his mind when he supported the idea of coming up with Tacloban Declaration declaration is the question to be answered. 

Disaster Risk Reduction in a Shifting Climate

SVRK Prabhakar

1. What can you tell from recent typhoon in Philippine and Cyclone in India? Are there any commonalities and differences and why?

One of the ways of judging the efficacy of disaster risk reduction (DRR) systems of any country is to look at how the government and other stakeholders have responded to a disaster and the subsequent impacts in terms of lives lost and property destroyed. However, comparison of disasters in two countries would have to be made with more caution and require deeper analysis than what the numbers suggest on the surface since the efficacy of DRR measures could be vastly different within a country because the DRR is the primary responsibility of local governments which differ in their capacities, depending on the strength of the event in question and can vary at what time of the year and time of the day of landfall of the event etc. Table 1 provides a comparison of tropical cyclones Phailin that hit Odisha, India on 12 October 2013 and Haiyan that hit Eastern Visayas of Philippines on 8th November. The following observations explain the reasons behind severe damages from Haiyan: a) The typhoon Haiyan was unarguably the stronger typhoon and was at its peak strength when it made landfall, b) The short early warning period (the first early warning available for a stronger Haiyan was 5th November that forecasted a wind speed of 167 kmph while the IMD was able to track the cyclone Phailin 4-5 days before with a forecasted wind speed of 180 kmph), c) early landfall than expected, d) slower and insufficient evacuation measures before landfall of typhoon; also partly due to unwilling people to relocate, e) slow rescue and relief operations due to complete disruption of local government machinery depriving any support to the national government and non-governmental agencies, f) relatively poorer DRR measures due to insufficient financial investments arguably due to skewed political decision making.

Table: Comparison of cyclone Phailin and typhoon Haiyan

Parameter	Cyclone Phailin	Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda)
Sustained maximum wind speed at landfall (kmph)	200-210[1]	235[2]
Saffir-Simpson Tropical Cyclone Scale[3]	Category 3-4	Category 4
Areas affected	Most of coastal Odisha and two Coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh	Central Philippines with maximum damage in Tacloban area
Last event of similar intensity	14 years	22 years
Time of landfall	22:30 hrs	4:40 hrs
Total deaths[4]	44	5759
Total affected	12 million	15 million
Number evacuated	1.5 million	1 million
Estimated total damage (billion USD)	0.7	2.4
Associated secondary disaster	Heavy rainfall and floods	Heavy rainfall and flood
Advance prediction of landfall and intensity	4-5 days	2-3   days

*Information, other than cited, was compiled from various web sources that can be easily traced using Google.

2. Can these recent extreme events be attributed to climate change? How can we make sense out of these?

The topic of attribution has its origin in perceptibly growing number of extreme events and related impacts. Attribution of any particular climatic event to climate change is the most difficult aspect of climate services and our understanding of climate system as a whole has not reached a point where the models employed can help us attribute certain climatic event to climate change with greater accuracy (Read Nature Editorial 19 December 2012). Irrespective of the purpose of attribution (e.g. climate negotiations), the emphasis on attribution may not yield as much value and usefulness compared to putting efforts on advanced early warning systems, strengthening dissemination and efficient application of early warning information for definitive actions on the ground. There is a sufficient agreement among climate researchers for high probability of extreme events in the future and there is a clear evidence for increasing number of extreme events historically. Despite this, there is certain difficulty in attributing the impacts on the ground to climate change for the reason that more and more people have been living in vulnerable areas putting them in the harm’s way than before. The rapid economic growth is only making this trend worse as more and more infrastructure is being constructed in vulnerable areas. Hence, understanding the dynamics of population growth and distribution and its interaction with the natural hazards assumes greater significance in understanding the observed impact trends and for achieving effective risk reduction.

Figure: While authorities were able to save thousands of lives, Phailin has left behind widespread devastation (Photo Courtesy: A. Shreekanth).

3) How government can prepare, nationally, internationally and locally, especially in the Asia Pacific Area?

Thanks to Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) and subsequent efforts at national and international levels, more countries have some kind of disaster preparedness and response plans and strategies and hence the picture of DRR is far better today than a decade ago. Today, several countries in the region have national authorities, ministries and departments for focused action on DRR. As a result, national and local systems have become better in handling the disasters and cyclone Phailin provides an important evidence for it. The accurate early warning has triggered authorities to evacuate large number of people and hence were able to avert a major disaster. Even in the case of Philippines, despite the widespread criticism, the authorities did manage to evacuate nearly a million within the short period of time available to them. However, there is a lot to be achieved along the continuum of disaster management cycle in a rage of areas which includes strengthening early warning and educating the communities on the importance of heeding to early warning, establishing sufficient number of evacuation shelters, enforcing proper regulations (land use and urban plans) restricting spread of infrastructure in vulnerable areas and strengthening coordination and communication channels across ministries and stakeholders engaged in DRR. While post-disaster rescue and relief has been perfected over the years due to traditionally response oriented national systems, more can be done in better relief management and post-relief and reconstruction planning. DRR cannot be achieved without proper information to rely upon and disaster databases that assist in identifying vulnerable and channeling resources are to be strengthened. The loss and damage databases being established by UNDP are able to bridge this gap to a greater extent. Risk information coupled with strengthened disaster mitigation measures will pave the way for designing and implementing appropriate insurance programs that will reduce the burden on national exchequer and put the people in the driving seat of managing their risks. While these traditional measures are most needed, there is also need to embark upon prospective planning by taking into consideration the increasingly perfecting climate projections into planning processes. Taking up adaptive management practices will go a long way in adjusting the institutional and regulatory systems as our understanding on climate change improve. There is lot of synergy between DRR and climate change adaptation and the tools and strategies perfected by these communities could be mutually beneficial. Today there are more opportunities for these two communities to work together due to growing number of networks and epistemic groups operating in these areas. The discussions for post-2015 Hyogo Framework Action and the future climate regime under UNFCCC begin to provide impetus for this nexus to happen on the ground.

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[1] 3 minutes sustained, Cyclone Warning Division, Indian Meteorological Department, 2013

[2] 10 minutes sustained, Severe Weather Bulletin No 6, Philippine Met Agency, PAGASA

[3] There are several tropical cyclone classifications. Following IMD classification, the Cyclone Phailin is classified as Very Severe Cyclone Storm and Typhoon Haiyan as Super Cyclonic Storm.

[4] IMD for Phailin and UN OCHA for Haiyan

Catastrophic risk insurance: Willingness and ability to pay

Catastrophic risk insurance assumes specific importance when we talk about disaster risk reduction or climate change adaptation or sustainable development since  risk insurance has been advocated and effectively used in small scale to achieve these broad goals in most instances. However, the spread or uptake of risk insurance in the Asia-Pacific region and  elsewhere remained negligible (compared to sales of Coke or cell phones?) due to several bottlenecks arising from policy and information imperfections. While part of the problem can be attributed to policy level imperfections, it is surprising to see that a subject that can greatly benefit corporate sector (really?) also seems to suffer same limitations that many other public policies face and the so called efficient and effective private sector seems to be oblivious to this fact that they are not able to reach out to a section of society that needs them most. The intriguing question here is, how come the same corporate sector that is extremely successful in selling a sugared drink (such as Coke or Pepsi) which in most opinion is useless and probably has least intrinsic value of whatsoever is failing to sell a very useful product such as risk insurance to the very same masses!

"If I could convince my son to ride bicycle without fear by wearing a helmet, I am sure our marketing agents are more than intelligent and can very well communicate the risk to adult population they are targeting!!!"

I am sure several people have already talked and written on this subject very extensively but I feel that there is definitely more than that meets the eye. In a quest to get even with this, I have been brainstorming (and writing) on this issue for quite some time and this is what I could come up with to summarize what may be limiting the spread of risk insurance in most cases:

1) Affordability: The issue of affordability could be put at the top of all the bottlenecks limiting the spread of risk insurance in the developing Asia-Pacific. Though insurance premiums in most of the developing Asia-Pacific region are lower than that of those in the developed countries, the annual insurance premium costs are still not affordable for most of the income groups in the developing countries. Part of the high insurance premium costs emerge from the high residual risks and low spread in terms of number of insured (i.e. poor development of the insurance portfolio). 

But, mind you, the cost of premium cannot be brought down beyond a point since the premium should meet lot of other expenses of the insurance company as well. Can we think about subsidizing the premium? Though this option appears to be most lucrative proposition for most policy makers, as they tend to go towards populistic measures, there are several others that go against this option. The argument here is sending proper price signal is important to make the insured feel the importance of [not]indulging in reckless risk taking behavior! Then the question is how do we bring down the price to an affordable level?

The price issue has two components, one is ability to pay and the second is willingness to pay. I think there is not much research on these points, if the success in uptake is achieved by targeting more on willingness to pay than on ability to pay.  I would be very happy to see an approach that targets both these components of price rather than getting lost in some kind of obscurity. 

2) Residual risks: High residual risks are one of the major causes for the poor risk insurance coverage in the region. The high residual risks are due to poor disaster risk mitigation mechanisms, lack of or poor enforcement of laws and codes such as building bylaws, structural codes, and laws pertaining to land use planning.

3) Presence of insurers and reinsurers: One of the reasons behind poor penetration of insurance and insurance prices above affordability is limited presence of private insurers and reinsurers. Reinsurers play an important role of providing shock absorbing capacity to the insurers. To date, very few national (e.g. General Insurance Corporation in India, China Reinsurance Company in China, Zenkyoren or Zenkoku Kyousai Seikatsukyoudoukumiai Rengou Kai in Japan) and international (e.g. Munich Re, Swiss Re, Toa Re, Axis Re) reinsurers operate in the region. Hence, there is a very high potential for the expansion of the reinsurance sector. Insurers and reinsurers cannot afford to operate in the region unless there is sufficient enabling environment including efforts to reduce the residual risks.

4) High premium costs: The high residual risks, lack of optimum number of insurers, low competition, and low number of insured population all lead to the higher premium costs than what they could be in the Asia-Pacific region.

5) Policy environment: Though risk insurance is a ‘market instrument’, its dynamics are determined or governed by the principles of an open market, government policies and regulatory guidelines act as precursors for flourishing of the sector and ensures the effectiveness of the instrument. Hence, the role of government in promoting the culture of risk mitigation by promoting awareness generation, and designing and implementing structural and non-structural disaster risk mitigation codes and laws including institutional mechanisms and regulations for promoting risk insurance is paramount.

Though there has already been significant improvement in terms of policy support to insurance sector, as observed from the high growth rates of insurance sector in the region, the support is still not comprehensive enough. For example, currently, most developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region are at the nascent stages of formulating national disaster risk mitigation plans and policies and haven’t fully utilized the potential of risk insurance in promoting risk reduction. Traditionally, strong emphasis of most governments on disaster response over mitigation is known to hinder the public participation in risk insurance schemes. Limited financing is the major reason behind the poor emphasis on disaster risk mitigation in the region.

6) Cultural and perceptional issues: General lack of awareness and misplaced perceptions about dealing with the risk in general and about the risk insurance in particular among the common people and business sector also serves as a bottleneck. Sociological research has indicated the existence of behavioral situation that can be characterized as ‘lethal attitude’ which suggests that things will happen whatever is done and that things are beyond ones’ control, which limit the risk mitigation behavior of individuals.

7) Lack of data: Infrastructure for collecting and managing the systematic and comparable data on past risks, vulnerabilities, disasters, and the nature of disaster losses provides important information for designing risk insurance schemes which is either not fully developed nor readily available and accessible to the risk insurance industry and for the general public in most of the developing nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Another important challenge, which didn’t receive much attention in the region, that could undermine the implementation of an affective insurance facility is the liability challenge that insurers will have to deal with due to not reporting their climate related risks to their shareholders, and probability for high insurance payouts due to high potential for yield losses in a changing climate scenario. As a result of these limitations, most of the initiatives couldn’t be scaled-up to cover larger, and sometimes important geographic areas and socio-economic groups that could benefit from insurance related instruments.

For more information, write to me and I will be happy to send a full paper that I have been working on this subject. 

Decision making, public participation and fairness in CCA

Research carried out by IGES, its partners, and other research community elsewhere involving policy makers and other stakeholders in climate change adaptation has revealed that the adaptation decision making in most of the Asia-Pacific countries and elsewhere is at nascent stages due to various issues such as limited understanding on how adaptation decision making could (or should) be different from developmental decision making, lack of tools or limited application of available tools to prioritize adaptation actions and limitations with policy and institutional mechanisms. A large school of scholars have been proposing that sound adaptation decision making is possible by measuring the progress in adaptation, through adaptation metrics and by embedding the principles of adaptation metrics into the existing project and program monitoring and evaluation procedures. Several monitoring and evaluation frameworks have already been proposed for adaptation projects claiming that understanding these frameworks and applying them on the ground can be of great help to project developers and implementers at all scales. However, it is not clear if these tools can help address issues such as public participation and fairness in decision making though most decision support tools claim to employ participatory processes. It is difficult to test the veracity of these claims since most of these frameworks are yet to be tested and compared on the ground in the real world.

Since climate change adaptation is a question of public policy requiring collective action and cognitive decision making, fairness and public participation are integral requirements for successful adaptation. Ensuring public participation has long been and loudly claimed by the experts and practitioners of community based adaptation (CBA). While such CBA approaches may enable public participation, there is no evidence to prove that these approaches have promoted fairness in decision making. So, creating enabling conditions for ensuring fairness may be crucial even in CBA based approaches, a question to explore. Though public participation and fairness are issues that have been historically the point of focus in developmental interventions, it is not very much clear how these experiences can be learned and applied to adaptation decision making.

Keeping the above issues in view, the author, in association with the Asia Pacific Adaptation Network, has organized a session on decision making, public participation and fairness on 12-13 May 2012 at the 2nd Adaptation Forum in Bangkok, Thailand. This session has addressed the questions such as how different are public participation and fairness issues in adaptation decision making, to what extent the proposed frameworks address the issues of public participation and fairness in adaptation decision making, what are the current experiences in promoting public participation and fairness in adaptation decision making, what enabling factors are crucial to ensure public participation and fairness in decision making and how they can be promoted? 

Various processes being taken up in adaptation decision making at the national level are already considering the issue of public participation in adaptation planning (Dr. Frank Griffin, Papua New Guinea). The issue of public participation has been addressed through two-tier consultation process wherein technical consultations were conducted at the national level and these findings were taken to the local level consultations to contextualize and identify specific adaptation practices.  The technical consultations have helped in ironing out the terminology that is being used by various stakeholders that led to proper communication among various stakeholders. In addition, the process has employed a robust process of climate change vulnerability assessment that has underlined the adaptation practices identified.

The case study of Tachin river basin highlighted the issue of multiplicity of plans, programs, institutions at the local level (Muanpong Juntopas, SEI). It showed that the evidence is crucial for successful decision making. Community based processes have helped in solving the issues such as poor vertical integration, integration across boundaries, sectors and basins.

On the contrary, the adaptation decision making process in Malaysia is centralized and top down driven (Gurmit Singh, Centre for Environment, Malaysia). The federal structure, lack of public consultation, and lack of transparency have posed several bottlenecks in adaptation decision making and communicating the message of adaptation in effective manner. It is apparent that in Malaysia, and elsewhere, adaptation should be considered as a rights issue (at par with the right to development).

Adaptation is also an issue of fairness issue (Atiq Rahman, BCAS). Fairness issue is very much limited to the international negotiations and it has been neglected at the national level. Fairness is a pre-requisite for promoting  good governance, and vise versa, at any level and it should not be limited to just the international negotiations. It is clear that, in most cases, the issue of fairness has been ignored even in the traditional developmental discourse. However,  the climate change has given new opportunity for us to discuss these issues and give greater emphasis in the decision making. Promoting local knowledge through processes such as community based adaptation and integrating/contextualizing the fairness discussion into food security, energy security, water security, health security and education securities that communities care about could be the way promote fairness.

Greater access to natural resources is a critical entry point for enabling greater participation in decision making since those with resources often happen to be the ones who makes decisions (Marcus  Moench,  ISET). Decentralization; access to information, shared learning and strengthening local governance can help promoting access to resources.

It is clear that public participation and fairness in decision making will not happen automatically but rather they need to be facilitated and promoted at all levels in a conscious manner. Issue of fairness can be very tricky when it comes to operationalizing since 'fair to whom' depends on 'who is defining fairness' and who is driving the discussion. It is often challenging to be fair to the entire section of community since there will always be losers and gainers in any given combination of resource allocation (this is just my opinion). Can we claim to have addressed the the fairness issue if 90% of vulnerable in the project location are benefited while other 10% are not since community rankings said it is OK to benefit top x number of people ranked as vulnerable? Probably not. While most project implementing agencies would like to benefit all vulnerable population in their project, often they would have to make decisions (or facilitate communities to take decisions in a participatory manner) such that project finances are 'efficiently' used rather than 'thinned out' (managers may think thinning out is a disaster for project reporting). This brings the discussion to the point that fairness is also closely linked with the 'project resources'. In the current socio-political and economic environment, it appears that bringing fairness to all is not 'just one of the challenges' that development practitioners and researchers would have to deal rather it is the crux of the problem in decision making. Fairness should be a 'chapter' in the Bible or Quran or Upnishad (or other sacred texts you can think) of every project, whether it deals with development or adaptation or disaster risk reduction.

Monitoring and evaluation of Community Based Adaptation: Where we are now?

Developmental practitioners have been monitoring and evaluating (M&E) developmental interventions using diverse set of participatory tools and concepts since time immemorial. Oftentimes it is done by comparing outputs and outcomes with the objectives and targets set by the project in a participatory manner which worked very well in a well understood field of development where boundaries are well defined and baselines stay static for all practical purposes. However, the concept of climate change adaptation is not at the same level of maturity as that of development, neither boundaries are clear, nor the diverse players engaged in climate change adaptation have come to the same terms as their engagement in development. This brings us to a set of well acknowledged challenges for M&E of climate change adaptation which include uncertainty in nature of impacts at time and geographical scales which makes difficult to pinpoint baselines which are not static as in a non-changing climate, long-term nature of climate change adaptation benefits accrued from adaptation projects while most projects are planned and implemented at relatively short periods, and different opinions, concepts, contexts and scales in which adaptation takes place. The overarching questions for M&E of CBA are how far can we use traditional/existing tools for M&Eing adaptation and what additional concepts/tools are needed for M&Eing adaptation? Specific questions are who decides what and how to be M&Ed, should different expectations of stakeholders from adaptation means different M&E frameworks/concepts/tools, and how to communicate and ensure M&E doesn’t become a burden on resources?

The session discussions have revealed that the same participatory tools that have been engaged in developmental planning could be well used for M&E of climate change adaptation (Robin James and Mike Wiggins).  Tools that bring greater integration of different actors, time and three-dimensional space appear to have greater value in understanding vulnerability and resilience (Robin James) and without fail be able to capture the most significant change brought by the project (Mike Wiggins). However, there is a need for stronger conceptual framework within which these tools can work well and communicate the right message from the evaluation outcomes.

Participatory tools have become standard protocol of entry into local level interventions for many agencies, whether for research or development or for both.

The session has clearly brought out that the conceptual frameworks are better developed if they are developed bottom up i.e. by distilling experiences and messages from M&E of on-the-ground projects (i.e. inductive) rather than through deductive means. The Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation, Reflection and Learning (MERL) is one such framework that has evolved bottom up from the experience of Action Research for Community Adaptation in Bangladesh (ARCAB) and other experiences that the IIED-CARE team has considered while developing MERL (Jessica Ayers). MERL employs learning by doing approach where in communities and practitioners are able to track, respond to, and take advantage of changing contexts and surprising events and emphasizes ‘accountability downwards’. Since the framework is based on several on-the-ground experiences, it has been able to identify a common set of indicators that all partners have chosen to evaluate the effectiveness of their actions.

ARCAB is an innovative long-term community based adaptation project that aims to generate scientific evidence for community based adaptation with the involvement of several local, national and international partners (Sumana Tanchangya). Being an innovation in itself, ARCAB has encountered several challenges which include difficulty defining CBA and the wide range of action and research partners working in different communities with different approaches, indicators and frameworks. On the positive side, these differences and commonalities have provided a fertile ground for crystallising M&E framework that was eventually emerged as ARCAB M&E Framework.

One major limitation with the M&E frameworks and approaches appears to be approaching resilience and adaptation ex ante i.e. informing project planners what would work and wouldn’t work with reasonable confidence before the project is designed and implemented. However, the Climate change and Environmental Degradation Risk and adaptation Assessment (CEDRA) pilot program appears to have overcome this limitation to a certain extent by putting emphasis on participative processes leading to identification of adaptation actions (Mike Wiggins). This program also recognizes the fact that communities are not just facing climate change but many other issues and a means to address all these issues in the M&E framework.

The session has clarified that the communities has to be the ones who determines what need to be measured and evaluated as is evident from the work presented in the session. However, it was observed that most often community tend to focus about immediate responses and the participatory adaptation interventions should be able to help them to see that short-term responses won’t help much for climate change adaptation. Frameworks/tools developed only based on ‘common elements’ tends to miss important lesson that differences and reason behind the existence of these differences has to offer. Avoiding tipping points is absolute necessity and it can be done by taking climate risks out of risk category and tracking what people are doing, outcomes around adaptive capacity and vulnerability relative to climate risks. 

Prepared by SVRK Prabhakar (IGES) based on discussions at the session on Monitoring and Evaluation of CBA, 6th International Conference on Community Based Adaptation, Hanoi, Vietnam. 

Low carbon agriculture in Indonesia

Abstract

Agriculture plays an important role in the national economy and food security of Indonesia. Increasing food production, while not adversely impacting the climate and local environment, is a challenge to be met. Indonesia has set an economy-wide emission reduction target of 20%. This would require rapid and substantial scaling up of mitigation technologies in agriculture sector as well. However, being a developing nation and vulnerable to a range of climate change impacts, the country also need to focus on adaptation aspects in its response to climate change. Meeting both adaptation and mitigation goals could pose challenge to the country with limited resources necessitating a synergistic approach to the problem. Such a synergistic approach is possible by considering both mitigation and adaptation goals while prioritizing mitigation and adaptation technologies from the context of policy focus. Estimation of marginal abatement costs and cost-benefit analysis of various agro-technologies could provide a means of meeting the both ends. The chapter has identified that there is a huge potential for the country to promote those adaptation technologies that have huge mitigation potential (and vice versa). The major barriers for expanding these technologies have been lack of proper incentives for technology adoption and capacity building of farmers. The best way to enhance the efficiency of a technology is to target it to the specific ecosystem conditions. While focusing on individual technologies, there is a need to consider how these technologies behave in the existing context of knowledge and infrastructure on the ground.

Need for Synergistic Approach to Climate Change in Indonesia

Indonesia is an agrarian economy with agriculture contributing to 13.8% of national GDP in terms of value addition and employs 38% of Indonesian population (The World Bank 2008). The government of Indonesia has made serious efforts to improve the food self sufficiency and nutritional security over the past decade. As a result, the national expenditure on agriculture stood at 21.9 trillion IDR in 2007, which is double the expenditure made in 2001. Despite the rising investments in agriculture, Indonesia is still a net importer of cereals, pulses and sugar and is facing the challenge of hunger and malnutrition with nearly 38% of its children suffering from under weight and malnutrition. Indonesia is classified as ‘serious’ in global hunger index by IFPRI.

As a vulnerable state to climate change impacts

While the above challenges are yet to be fully addressed, the climate change brings another dimension of challenge to the Indonesian agriculture which is due to its vulnerability to the climate change impacts while also contributing to the climate change (Las and Unadi 2010). A short discussion on climate change impacts on Indonesian agriculture is presented in the chapter on ‘Developing adaptation policies in the agriculture sector: Indonesia’s experience Agriculture’ in this book. Past climate observations and available climate change projections indicate that Indonesia is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts (Ministry of Environment October 1999, Ministry of Environment 2011). The historical analysis of climatic data has indicated a significant increase in maximum and minimum temperatures across most of the stations in Indonesia along with associated sea level rise (Ministry of Environment 2011).  Past trends also indicated the presence of changes in precipitation, incidence of extreme temperatures and dry spells associated with a clear influence of decadal cycles of El Nino and La Nina. However, the trends were not uniform across the Island nation. For example, significant reduction in December-January rainfall was observed in parts of Sumatra, Java and Papua while an increase in precipitation was observed in eastern Indonesia including parts of Bali and Nusa Tenggara Barat. Despite the limitations in the availability of good quality projections for Indonesia region, the available projections indicated a similar trend as that of the historical trends (e.g. increased wet days in Bali and Nusa Tenggra). Though conclusive evidence is not yet available on projected negative impacts of climate change on crop production, analysis presented in Indonesian National Communications indicate change in wet and dry spells and seasonal precipitation patterns along with the influence of El Nino could largely pose serious threat to the Indonesian agriculture.

As a contributor of GHG emissions

In addition being vulnerable to climate change impacts, Indonesia also contributes to climate change in both direct and indirect means. As a direct source, Indonesian agriculture contributes to about 6% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the sector stands fourth after land use, land use change and forestry, fuel combustion, and waste sectors (Figure 1). The major contributors of GHG emissions in agriculture sector are rice paddies (Methane emissions to the tune of 34,860 GgCO2e), soil fertilizations (nitrous oxides emissions to the tune of 15,534 GgCO2e), and other minor sources such as emissions from manure piles, biomass burning etc (to the tune of 12,271 GgCO2e) (Suryahadi and Permana 2010).

Figure 1. GHG emissions (%) from various sectors in Indonesia (Las and Unadi 2010)

Land use changes: The indirect contribution of agriculture to GHG emissions is through demand for land. The growing population exerts pressure on food that in turn exerts pressure on land and other sources forcing intensive cultivation practices such as fertilizer applications and irrigation water pumping. In a scenario of increasing population, the agriculture is expected to produce more food either through vertical expansion (increase in productivity) or through the horizontal expansion (land use changes from forests to agricultural purposes). In Indonesia, both these phenomenon can be seen in the recent past. The productivity levels of Indonesian agriculture have increased over the years and more specifically in food crops such as rice. The rice productivity has more than doubled over a period of 40 years (FAO 2010), mostly due to employment of high yielding varieties, irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. At the same time, the cereal demand during the past four decades has also increased from 10 million tons in 1961 to 39 million tons in 2005 (FAO 2010). In order to meet this demand, over the same period, the area under primary crops has increased by 113% and the area under agriculture has increased by 25.6% while the area under forests has reduced by 38% in the last two decades alone (FAO 2010). This partially indicates that agriculture has played a role in converting the land under forests to agriculture in Indonesia. This is in conformity with the trend observed in the Southeast Asia (Figure 2; Prabhakar, 2010; and FAO, 2010) and corroborates to that of the land use change trends presented in the Second National Communication submitted by the Government of Indonesia (Ministry of Environment 2011).

Figure 2. Expansion of area under agriculture with corresponding decline in area under forests in Southeast Asia (FAO 2010).

Changing food preferences: Indonesia is a major non-vegetarian population. With growing income levels, the per capita consumption of animal products is also increasing over the years. As result, the emissions from animal husbandry are significant in Indonesia. The enteric fermentation contributes to the tune of 12,755 GgCO2e of methane annually. As shown in Figure 3, the animal husbandry related emissions have shown an increasing trend since 2003 owing to relative increase in animal population (Suryahadi and Permana 2010). 

Read the full article at: http://enviroscope.iges.or.jp/modules/envirolib/view.php?docid=3044 

Institutional arrangements and systemic barriers for mainstreaming climate change adaptation

The importance of various institutions in achieving climate change adaptation in specific and sustainable development in general have been well recognized by various international conventions such as processes under UNFCCC and the Commission on Sustainable Development. Institutions play catalytic role in bridging gaps and linking opportunities with needs so that the agenda of climate change adaptation is fulfilled to its fullest extent (UNFCCC, 2007). However, there are systemic barriers that make these institutions less than ideal in delivering the expected deliverables by them. For example, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, 2005) has identified the weaknesses with many partner institutions to implement result driven development strategies, accountability, and transparency. Similar concerns appear to be the reason behind the slow progress in Millennium Development Goals (United Nations, 2010). These institutional limitations would also effect the adaptation activities since adaptation activities would also have to be financed and managed by the same institutions in most national circumstances.

Panel members discussion the role of institutions in promoting low carbon development in the Asia Pacific Region

In order to overcome some of these barriers, various international (e.g. UNEP Adaptation Network), regional (e.g. UNEP Asia Pacific Adaptation Network), and thematic networks (e.g. University Network for Climate and Ecosystems Adaptation Research of UNU, and Ecosystems and Livelihoods Adaptation Network of International Union for Conservation of Agriculture) have come into existence (Asia Pacific Adaptation Network, 2011; UNU, 2011; IUCN, 2011). These networks have the agenda of promoting collaborative research and understanding on climate change adaptation and link various stakeholders with the opportunities that exist to promote adaptation. Though these networks are largely successful in bringing together various stakeholders and sharing the information across boundaries, their effectiveness in addressing overarching barriers such as limited funds for adaptation (Srinivasan and Al-Amin, 2010) and means to measure progress in adaptation (Prabhakar et al., 2010) have been limited.

Substantive discussions on institutional arrangements for promoting adaptation could be observed under the Conference of Parties (Prabhakar and Srinivasan, 2009). The establishment of Adaptation Fund Board has been one important step in accelerating adaptation actions in resource constrained and highly vulnerable countries (Adaptation Fund, 2011). Nationally, few countries in Asia have established institutional mechanisms to govern adaptation. Notable to mention are the National Council on Climate Change and Indonesia Climate Change Trust Fund by Indonesia, climate change resilience fund by Bangladesh, Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change by India, and National Leading Group to Address Climate Change and Clean Development Mechanism Fund by China.

References

Adaptation Fund, 2011: Adaptation Fund established by the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Accessed 17 June 2011 at http://www.adaptation-fund.org.

Asia Pacific Adaptation Network, 2011: Climate Change Adaptation in Asia and the Pacific. Accessed 17 June 2011 at http://www.asiapacificadapt.net/.

IUCN, 2011: Ecosystems and Livelihoods Adaptation Network, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Switzerland. Accessed on 17 June 2011 at http://www.elanadapt.net/.

Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, 2005: Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness: Ownership, harmonization, alignment, results, and mutual accountability. Accessed 17 June 2011 at www.adb.org/media/articles/2005/7033_international_community_aid/paris_declaration.pdf.

Prabhakar, S.V.R.K., T. Kobashi, and A. Srinivasan, 2010: Monitoring Progress of Adaptation to Climate Change: The Use of adaptation metrics. Asian Journal of Environment and Disaster Management, 2 (3): 435-442.

Prabhakar, S.V.R.K. and A. Srinivasan, 2009: Financing and Governing Adaptation and Promoting Disaster Risk Reduction. Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Hyama, Japan. Accessed 17 June 2011 at http://enviroscope.iges.or.jp/modules/envirolib/view.php?docid=1856.

Srinivasan, A. and A.Q. Al-Amin, 2010: Financing Adaptation in Agriculture and Water Sectors in Asia: An overview. Asian Journal of Environment and Disaster Management, 2 (3): 427-434.

UNFCCC. 2007: Bali Action Plan. Report of the Conference of the Parties on its thirteenth session, held in Bali from 3 to 15 December 2007. Bonn, Germany: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

United Nations, 2010: Keeping the promise: a forward-looking review to promote an agreed action agenda to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Report of the Secretary-General. Accessed 17 June 2011 at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/238/02/PDF/N1023802.pdf.

UNU, 2011: University Network for Climate and Ecosystems Adaptation Research. UNU, Tokyo, Japan. Accessed on 17 June 2011 at http://isp.unu.edu.