IRIN: Climate change is not only testing the resilience of people, but also of development and disaster risk reduction projects set up to help people. Now, there may be a way to make the gamble more favourable.If you were a small or medium-size NGO trying to set up a project in a flood-prone area in Bangladesh or Mozambique, you might not be aware of the climate risks. And if you knew that floods might wash away any structure you put up, what do you do? Well, you build a structure with "two walls that will collapse on impact by a rapid flood, so the remainder of the house remains standing and occupants are not harmed, but in the knowledge that repairs will be necessary," is the advice given by a new environmental tool.
Tearfund, an international relief and development NGO with experience dating back to the 1990s, designed the tool to help small and medium-size NGOs assess the risks, manage them, and - where possible - adapt to them.
The tool, called Climate change and Environmental Degradation Risk and Adaptation assessment (CEDRA), helps NGOs access and understand climate change and environmental degradation, and the science behind it, and compare this with local experience of environmental change.
"There are lots of tools out there to help national governments or donors, but we assessed them and realized they did not really help the small NGOs working in developing countries," said Sarah Wiggins of Tearfund. ''Instead of asking 'Is there less rain?' ask 'What is the weather situation like now? How has it changed over the last ten years? Or since you were a child? ''
The NGO developed the tool - which Wiggins described as a "framework" - by using their experience of problems as a result of changing weather patterns in countries like Afghanistan.
Full-length profile portrait of Turkoman woman, standing on a carpet at the entrance to a yurt, dressed in traditional clothing and jewelry, from 1911. The source is the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)
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