“GOOD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH” Climate responses struggle to meet escalating threats
Donal Brown
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We are only eight years away from the year 2030. The dire warning of the IPCC’s recent report is upon us. There is an urgent need to act, and ‘good is not good enough’. We need beyond good – we need transformative solutions.” This, according to Indran A. Naidoo, Director of the Independent Office of Evaluation of IFAD, who moderated a side event at the COP26, in Glasgow. The IFAD-led side event took place on 4 November 2021, under the auspices of the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UNFCCC. Entitled ‘Evidence-based Transformative Pathways to Build Climate Resilience in the Agricultural Sector’, the talk-show style event gathered insights from leading evaluation experts and senior international development actors, and blended them with civil society and government experiences. Panellists and speakers included Donal Brown, Associate Vice-President of the Programme Management Department of IFAD; S. Nanthikesan, Lead Evaluator at IOE; Andreas Reumann, Head, a.i, of the Independent Evaluation Unit at the Green Climate Fund; Sven Harten, Deputy Director of DEval; and James Gasana, international specialist in natural resource management and climate change. Climate change disproportionately affects smallholder agriculture that constitutes 75% of the global farmland and provides more than 80% of food consumed in the developing world. As such, strengthening climate resilience of smallholders is at the heart of IFAD’s mandate to eliminate poverty and food insecurity in rural areas.
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“Smallholder farmers that have received [IFAD] support are 13% more resilient than their counterparts – that represents 26 million people. To do that, we put dedicated resources right down to where they count, to the most vulnerable. Over the past three years, 35% of our resources have gone to adaptation. In the next three years it will be 40%”, explained Donal Brown. To reap the benefits of these efforts and those of the international community at large, there is urgent need to go beyond effective measures and seek transformative climate change adaptation (CCA) solutions. “We support access to knowledge, investing in and using the knowledge of local communities. We put communities at the centre of natural resource management, identifying adaptive solutions with communities. It’s not just about the hard infrastructure, it’s also about investing in the capacity of communities in managing these effectively. Key to this is collecting good data and evidence, and adjusting decisions in real time – adaptive management”, further stated Donal Brown. Evaluative evidence shows the successes of these and other similar interventions, at local level.
Indran A. Naidoo
“Yet, there remains a shortfall of broad knowledge-base of climate adaptation solutions, as these experiences are not translating into global success”, underscored Dr Naidoo. Against this backdrop, the experts presiding the side event explored the challenges and oppor-
