Attachments
Hannah Reid and Anu Adhikari
Summary
Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) is the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of an overall strategy to help people to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. Under the ‘Ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation: strengthening the evidence and informing policy’ project, IIED, IUCN and the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) are working at 13 sites in 12 countries to gather practical evidence and develop policy guidance for governments on how EbA can best be implemented. The project has developed a definition of effective EbA and a framework for assessing EbA effectiveness which has been applied at all 13 sites, and the results will be collated and compared to draw conclusions that are based on more than single case studies. This report presents the findings from a literature review, and interviews with a wide variety of stakeholders conducted by IUCN at the project site in the Panchase region of Nepal, where activities aimed at improving access to water resources, bioengineering practices and cultivation of useful plants, as well as livelihood improvement programmes, were implemented to help mountain communities adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.
The report concludes that EbA can be an effective way to tackle climate change. The project activities helped people maintain or improve their adaptive capacity or resilience, and reduce their vulnerability to climate change, in a multitude of ways. While it was clear that some groups benefitted more from improvements than others, there was little evidence of this coming at a cost to others. Many social co-benefits also emerged from the project, and it was clear that the use of participatory processes had been key to improving community adaptive capacity. Also as a result of the project, ecosystem resilience in Panchase improved and ecosystem services were maintained or restored, primarily at the catchment level.
Downstream improvements in ecosystem service provision were often larger than improvements at the project sites, however, and increases in crop raiding and water provision for conservation rather than agricultural needs were apparent. A number of cost-benefit analyses were conducted on various activities implemented under the project that suggest that EbA approaches were cost-effective and compared well with alternative adaptation approaches. Quantifying the monetary values of ecosystem services and environmental resources, however, was challenging.