To support countries in implementing their commitment to fostering a more resilient form of development, AFD has set up AdaptAction, a tool with a budget of €30 million for its first phase (2017-2022). Through the use of vulnerability and feasibility studies, guidance in drafting national policy and action plans, as well as capacity-building actions, AdaptAction provides a leverage effect to help these countries access international climate finance and accelerate their adaptation investment.
In all its actions, AdaptAction pays particular attention to climate vulnerabilities linked to gender, nature-based solutions, and the building of solutions together with its partners. It also makes sure its actions are in line with development trajectories that prioritize resilience.
More than 75 studies have been conducted since 2017, by more than 500 experts in many sectors, some of which have been the subject of lessons learned and recommendations sheets: governance, monitoring and evaluation systems (both with Expertise France), agriculture, integrated water resources management, climate services, nature-based solutions and disaster risk reduction.
AdaptAction has leveraged more than €580 million in resilient investments financed by AFD or co-financed with other partners, such as the Green Climate Fund or the European Union. Other projects currently under appraisal point to a total leverage of more than one billion euros.
Refocused on Africa, with 12 partner countries, AdaptAction’s second phase (2022-2025) was launched at COP26 in Glasgow with an additional budget of €15M. It is organized around a threefold strategy:" understanding, planning, investing ", with reinforced cross-cutting components on gender issues and the circulation of knowledge.
An extension in partnership with UNCDF LoCAL is also being planned for the Mediterranean area, described as an "adaptation hot spot" by the IPCC, with funding from the European Union (DG NEAR).
Higher temperatures, increasingly variable rainfall, and more pronounced droughts are all effects of climate change that, in the Sahel, could lead to land degradation, changes in seasonal grazing patterns, and a reduction in the water available to people and livestock.
Since 2017, AdaptAction has been working with its Senegalese and Nigerian partners to implement structuring multi-stakeholder and multifaceted adaptation projects that promote investments in sectors as diverse as agriculture, water, coastal protection, environment and nature-based solutions, and education. These projects, which respond to the specific context of the Sahel, aim to increase resilience to climate change while promoting sustainable economic growth, employability (especially of youth), and biodiversity conservation.
Senegal, Niger and Gambia have committed to the Paris Climate Agreement for sustainable growth that strengthens the resilience of their populations and territories facing the consequences of climate change. Gambia is one of the new partner countries for AdaptAction Phase 2: possible studies and technical assistance will be determined during 2023.
The Indian Ocean States are on the climate change’s front line. Although their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is negligible, their environments, economies, and societies are suffering significant and potentially irreversible damage from its effects. Island States are moreover highly exposed to extreme climate events (cyclones, floods, etc.) and to coastal erosion and marine flooding.
The economic cost of "natural" disasters, mainly related to hydro-meteorological hazards, has amounted to about 17.2 billion dollars over the last thirty years for this part of the world. The need for resilient and sustainable investments for these States is therefore substantial and requires long-term planning based on available knowledge and the development priorities of each island.
To this end, since 2017, the AdaptAction program has been supporting Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Union of Comoros with the implementation of adaptation policies and strategies while facilitating access to international climate finance.
In the first phase, which ended in 2022, twelve support projects were completed to build capacity, improve climate governance and integrate climate change adaptation into public policy. Over the five years of the program, more than €370 million has also been invested in projects to support hydrometeorological and climate services, as well as early warning systems at regional level, and to increase resources for disaster recovery programs (contingency loan granted to Mauritius).
In the Gulf of Guinea, AdaptAction has supported Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Guinea in their efforts to adapt to climate change. Phase 2 will continue in partnership with Guinea, Benin and Togo.
The Gulf of Guinea is exposed to droughts, floods, changes in rainfall patterns and increased coastal erosion. All of these hazards are expected to intensify as a result of climate change, and to which the populations, their habitat and their main sources of livelihood are vulnerable.
In response, AdaptAction aims to improve climate governance in partner countries, to strengthen the integration of adaptation into sectoral and territorial planning and budgeting, and to build investment projects that respond directly to the impacts of climate change in the agriculture, transport infrastructure, forest/biodiversity and protection sectors, as well as to the deployment of agro-climatic services for better planning of agricultural activities, while strengthening the consideration of gender issues and social inclusion in vulnerability analysis.
Local authorities are key players in the implementation of climate agendas and sustainable development. Indeed, through their day-to-day administration, local authorities are well positioned to provide insights on the most pressing issues, the sectors they apply to, and the possible solutions. Further, actions aimed at generating resilience, conducted at the local level, can be systematized and scaled up with effective, efficient, and sustainable results.
The region urgently needs to develop long-term services to facilitate planning and decision-making in a range of sectors sensitive to current and projected climate impacts, such as agriculture, disaster risk reduction, and others.
The Caribbean territories are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change (rising temperatures, intense extreme events, rising sea and salt water intrusions…), due to their location, their geological and topographical features, and their socioeconomic profile. Climate phenomena’s real and potential effects are diverse (affected transport infrastructures and essential services, economic losses for key sectors such as tourism and agriculture, climate-sensitive sicknesses development, worsening of socioeconomic and gender inequalities, populations’ displacement, impacts on ecosystems…).
This vulnerability deepened by anthropogenic phenomena (land pressure over coastal zones, sand exploitation, deforestation…) make of these states “sentinels states” illustrating both the potential negative consequences of climate change at a global level and adaptation laboratories at regional and local levels.
Central Africa is characterised by an ecological potential of global importance for its biodiversity abundance and its role in stabilizing climate at a global level. Central Africa accounts for the second world’s largest rainforest behind the Amazon forest. As a mosaic of forests, savannahs, wetlands, rivers and flooded forests, the Congo basin provides food, water and shelter to more than 75 million people.
The region presents at the same time high vulnerabilities linked to climate change and translating into seasonal variabilities with a strong impact on the agricultural calendar, essential pluvial, with floods across the territory, water and coastal erosions. Most Central African countries already suffer the effects of climate change and present high vulnerability indicators on the middle to long terms, notably linked to the weakness in preparation and the lack of means to face these impacts.
The Congo Basin’s abundance in forest ecosystems sometimes occults the importance of the abundance within Central Africa’s littoral zones. Yet these zones are crucial as they represent an economic lever, an opening-up mean for the region and often the only way for commercial exchanges at the regional and international levels. Similarly, to the other regions, Central Africa’s littoral zone present great vulnerabilities considering climate change. The Central African coastal area shelters extremely important economic sectors such as fishing, tourism, agriculture, energy and maritime transport which are often threatened by erosion, sea-levels rise, floods, pollution, marine intrusions and urban development, to cite just a few.
Congo: Within the fighting against deforestation context, the Congo plans the agricultural valorisation of its savannahs’ areas to both ensure its food self-sufficiency and to reduce the pressure put on forests and biodiversity. AdaptAction realizes a vulnerability study on agriculture within savannahs zones considering climate change in order to identify viable technical roads and propose a resilient investment plan with the incentive to accompany agriculture-related decision-making and investment choices in the savannahs areas on a middle to long term.
Cameroon: The country’s economy rests mostly on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, which represent one of its development pillars. In arid and semi-arid areas in the North and Extreme North, agropastoralism represents the main activity leading the local economy and stands for an important part of the population’s activities. This region, has known, in the last years, an alternation between long dry seasons followed by short rain seasons, of which variations in intensity and their random character have an incidence on the anticipation and the management of “natural” disasters (badly controlled floods, delays on cultural calendars and the reorganization needs concerning the access to culture and pasture spaces…).
During the 2040 decade, the risk would be particularly pronounced in the North and Extreme North, while it regroups the higher rates of populations living under the poverty line. This could increase the already occurring North-South Migrations, in particular heading to the urban centres of Douala and Yaoundé (Changement climatique et gestion des risques de catastrophe au Cameroun, World Bank 2017).
In this perspective, AdaptAction has conducted a vulnerability study of the cereal agriculture in the country’s North and Extreme North alongside with the reinforcement of institutions for the management of agropastoral-related conflicts with the intention to propose new resilient technical roadmaps for small cereal producers and the development of tool boxes for conflict management inclusive of climate change’s multiplier effect on already occurring agropasoral conflicts.
