The Climate Nexus Initiative builds bridges among development goals, actors and initiatives, bringing forth added-value from synergies and complementarities.
The so called Arab spring highlighted the importance of better understanding that social vulnerability and instability, poverty and inequality, migration and population growth, and urbanization are increasingly complex to manage, not least due to natural constraints such as limited arable land and freshwater. Climate change adds complexity to a number of these trends, making natural shocks and stresses like drought more frequent, intense and in some cases, creating new risk hotspots that demand urgent and concerted action.
The League of Arab States (LAS) recognized a positive trend in the number of initiatives addressing major challenges faced by the Arab region such as those related to water scarcity and food security, climate change and drought and land degradation and desertification, among others. A few of them were presented at the Third Arab Water Forum, which took place in Cairo during the period 9-11 December 2014. LAS has thus expressed the concern, with consensus also from several partner organizations, for a possible need to mainstreaming the ongoing work and to creating a coordination mechanism between them, in order to ensure effectiveness, and avoid duplication.
The Climate Nexus Initiative helps realize the goal of LAS to achieve greater policy coherence across goals of climate change, disaster risk reduction, food and water security, and social vulnerability. The Initiative design process has benefited from consultations during 2015 in Cairo between regional offices of various agencies including IFPRI. This included partner meetings hosted by WFP on 4 June and by UNISDR on 14 July. A core group consisting of LAS, UNDP, WFP, UNISDR and AWC was constituted to lead design of the initiative. The process benefited greatly from technical support of UNDPs Arab Climate Resilience Initiative.
The objective of the Climate Nexus Initiative is to develop capacities of LAS and Member States to enact decisions and policies that better manage the growing complexity of risks and support the resilience of people. Development in the Arab region is inherently complex and non-linear, with shocks and stresses the new norm. This calls for more integrated approaches that address converging drivers of change and policy responses across disciplines. The Climate Nexus Initiative will help develop capacities of regional and local partners to address gaps that exist to achieving more risk-informed development and help to strengthen the resilience of people.
One major gap is the lack of a strong ‘Arab region profile’ that helps understand the nature of converging risks in the region and the implications for development goals in the region, and beyond. By improving the use of science and capacities of networks in the region, a better picture of the risk and resilience profile of the region can emerge. An important gap likewise exists in use of science for decision-making processes, with development policies and practices often not aligned to the actual contextual analysis and needs that arises from accurate science and data generation.
The Climate Nexus Initiative builds bridges among development goals, actors and initiatives, bringing forth added-value from synergies and complementarities.
The Initiative serves as a platform for joint programming between LAS and partner agencies to bring about a series of outcomes in the region that engage the complexity of risks, and exemplify resilient-based development solutions. Through this initiative, efforts will be made to: strengthen regional cooperation and knowledge networks across disciplines, respond to gaps in science and data for managing risks, and enhance use of indicators and early warning systems, building local leadership and capacities for risk and resilience, and support transformational change in development policies.
Accordingly, Four Areas of Work as being critical to achieving an integrated set of outcomes under the post-2015 development agenda, the Arab Plan of Action on Climate Change and the Arab Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction.
A series of projects would be generated under the Initiative for the 2015-2020 period under these Areas of Work, while the initiative will also support establishment of networks among regional and national institutions and centers of excellence across disciplines. In doing so, it will help create synergies across sectors to reduce fragmentation of efforts, and make existing efforts ‘greater than the sum of their parts’.
