Why is it so hard to make aid climate-smart?

Megan Rowling in AlertNet: Most aid workers know it doesn't make sense to build a house or install a water pump in a spot that's flooded every year, nor to get farmers to switch to crops that will make them more money now but yield less as temperatures rise. Yet there's no guarantee those types of mistakes still aren't being made, despite growing awareness of the extra complications climate change brings.

Experts who have worked on the nexus between climate change, disaster risk reduction and development for years say the three strands still aren't fully joined up when it comes to projects on the ground – and they have produced a new guide that aims to speed up progress in linking the three.

Some progress is being made, but it has been pretty slow. This is frustrating when it's increasingly recognised that extreme weather and rising seas are likely to bring more disasters and displacement as the planet warms, setting development back by decades in the worst-hit places.

"The three tribes know each other exist, and they barter a bit, but they aren't connected enough," says Terry Cannon, director of the Strengthening Climate Resilience (SCR) project, a consortium of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University and the non-governmental organisations Plan International and Christian Aid.

The consortium has just released a new guide, "Changing climate, changing disasters: pathways to integration", which outlines a step-by-step approach to help disaster risk practitioners in NGOs and governments incorporate climate knowledge into their programmes....

A tree in a flooded field in Bangladesh, shot by Ziaul Hoque, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license