Adaptation policy shift could help the poor

IRIN: If the Indus delta in southern Pakistan were protected by mangroves, a few hundred villages would have been saved from the floods, say Pakistani environmentalists. Thriving mangroves are a sign of healthy ecosystems, which require fresh water and a bit of investment. "Unfortunately we have not had both," said Ghulam Hussain Khwaja, president of Sindh Radiant, an environmental NGO based in the delta region in Pakistan's southern Sindh province.

Pakistan, like many other developing countries, has lacked the resources and policy direction to invest in "biodiverse" initiatives such as mangroves, which fall within the ambit of the environment ministry, also neglected, says Hannah Reid, a researcher at the climate change group at the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

However, the UN’s push for the inclusion of national biodiversity strategies in countries' plans to cope with climate change - their National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA) -could change that. The shift was one of the outcomes of a recent meeting of the secretaries of the three Rio Conventions - Luc Gnacadja of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Christiana Figueres from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and Ahmed Djoghlaf of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

"This is good news for poor communities as most investment in adaptation to climate change has revolved around infrastructure, such as building concrete embankments," said Reid, who has long championed the value of healthy ecosystems as climate insurance. "I am glad that policy-makers have finally begun to join the dots," she said. Various studies have shown that climate change is set to erode ecosystems, which play a critical role in building poor communities' resilience to climate-related risks….

Map of world mangrove distribution, by Pinpin 08:35, 26 May 2006 (UTC), Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license