Giacomo Fedele

Synergies between adaptation and mitigation in climate change finance

As adaptation and mitigation are separated in international and national policies, there is also a division in the financial resources mobilized by the international community to help developing countries deal with climate change. Given that mitigation activities can benefit or hinder adaptation, and vice versa, promoting activities that contribute to both objectives can increase the efficiency of fund allocation and minimize trade-offs, particularly in land-related activities such as agriculture and forestry. Information is missing, however, on how climate funding organizations consider the integration of adaptation and mitigation. We interviewed representatives of climate funds directed toward forestry and agriculture to gain a better understanding of how they perceive the benefits, risks and barriers of an integrated approach, whether they have concrete activities for promoting this approach, and how they foresee the future of adaptation-mitigation integration. Interviews revealed a diverse range of perceived benefits, risks and barriers at local, national and global scales. Most interviewees focused on the local benefits of this integration (for example increasing the resilience of forest carbon projects), whereas others emphasized global risks (for example decreasing global funding efficiency because of project complexity). Despite the general interest in projects and policies integrating adaptation and mitigation, few relevant actions have been implemented by organizations engaged in climate change finance. This paper provides new insight into how the representatives of climate funds perceive and act on the integration of adaptation and mitigation in forestry and agriculture. Our findings can inform the development of procedures for climate change finance, such as the Green Climate Fund. While managers of climate funds face barriers in promoting an integrated approach to adaptation and mitigation, they also have the capacity and the ambition to overcome them.

Reducing risks by transforming landscapes: Cross-scale effects of land-use changes on ecosystem services

Globally, anthropogenic environmental change is exacerbating the already vulnerable conditions of many people and ecosystems. In order to obtain food, water, raw materials and shelter, rural people modify forests and other ecosystems, affecting the supply of ecosystem services that contribute to livelihoods and well-being. Despite widespread awareness of the nature and extent of multiple impacts of land-use changes, there remains limited understanding of how these impacts affect trade-offs among ecosystem services and their beneficiaries across spatial scales. We assessed how rural communities in two forested landscapes in Indonesia have changed land uses over the last 20 years to adapt their livelihoods that were at risk from multiple hazards. We estimated the impact of these adaptation strategies on the supply of ecosystem services by comparing different benefits provided to people from these land uses (products, water, carbon, and biodiversity), using forest inventories, remote sensing, and interviews. Local people converted forests to rubber plantations, reforested less productive croplands, protected forests on hillsides, and planted trees in gardens. Our results show that land-use decisions were propagated at the landscape scale due to reinforcing loops, whereby local actors perceived that such decisions contributed positively to livelihoods by reducing risks and generating co-benefits. When land-use changes become sufficiently widespread, they affect the supply of multiple ecosystem services, with impacts beyond the local scale. Thus, adaptation implemented at the local-scale may not address development and climate adaptation challenges at regional or national scale (e.g. as part of UN Sustainable Development Goals or actions taken under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement). A better understanding of the context and impacts of local ecosystem-based adaptation is fundamental to the scaling up of land management policies and practices designed to reduce risks and improve well-being for people at different scales.

Ecosystem-Based Strategies for Community Resilience to Climate Variability in Indonesia

Rural communities have long been using ecosystems to sustain their livelihoods, especially in times of disasters when forests act as safety nets and natural buffers. However, it is less clear how climate variability influences changes in land uses, and their implications for human well-being. We examined how forests and trees can reduce human vulnerability by affecting the three components of vulnerability: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. A total of 24 focus group discussions and 256 household surveys were conducted in two smallholder-dominated rural landscapes in Indonesia, which were affected by floods, drought and disease outbreaks. Our results suggest that forests and trees are important in supporting community resilience and decreasing their vulnerabilities to climate-related stresses in different ways. The role of trees varied according to the type of ecosystem service, whether provisioning or regulating, in relation to the phase of the climatic hazard, either in the pre-disaster phase or in the post-disaster recovery phase. It is therefore important to distinguish between these elements when analyzing people’s responses to climatic variability in order to fully capture the contribution of forests and trees to reducing people’s vulnerability. Landscape spatial characteristics, environmental degradation and community awareness of climate variability are crucial because if their linkages are recognized, local people can actively manage natural resources to increase their resilience. Interventions related to forests and trees should take into consideration these aspects to make ecosystem services a valuable option for an integrated strategy to reduce disaster risks and climate-related vulnerabilities.