Feb 04, 2020
12-year-old student Chhorn Manich remembers when her Cambodian village of Toul Ta Ek flooded during the rainy season. “Whenever this happens it is difficult for a kid like me to go to school. I usually come late or skip classes when there is a flood,” she said.
Through a new drainage initiative supported by the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), this is fortunately no longer the case. “The flooding does not happen anymore, and I get to go to school every day,” beamed Manich.
Chhorn Manich’s village is one of many vulnerable communities around the world bearing the brunt of climate impacts such as extreme flooding. Climate change is a risk multiplier in resource-strapped environments, exacerbating food insecurity, depleting water reserves, making farming land infertile, and disrupting infrastructure and basic services.
This complicates efforts to support developing countries such as Cambodia in achieving its sustainable development objectives. Recent studies say this is only becoming more difficult, with climate impacts being responsible for as much as a 31% decrease in GDP per capita between 1961 and 2010.
Through its Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR), CIF is working to reverse these trends by helping developing countries incorporate climate and disaster risk into development and investment programs. Globally, PPCR investments have supported communities in building resilience to climate impacts and climate-driven disasters by addressing, among other things, poor access to natural and financial resources, insufficient information and expertise, and lacking infrastructure and basic services.
As part of a PPCR program in Cambodia, Chhorn Manich’s village of Toul Ta Ek village received funding to rehabilitate and develop drainage facilities to help divert flood water away from vital infrastructure like roads and pathways, particularly during the rainy months. This will help overcome infrastructure gaps and disruptions to basic services, ensuring children like Chhorn can attend her classes even at the height of monsoon season.
Meanwhile, again through PPCR, Mozambique is rehabilitating and climate-proofing over 300 kilometers of roads and vital infrastructure in the southern province of Gaza, where 70% of transportation networks have been impacted by floods. Specific measures include reshaping, gravelling, widening existing drainage structures while constructing new ones, and flattening slopes. The program is helping the country adopt a climate and disaster risk-informed approach to road design, construction, rehabilitation and maintenance. These efforts are also helping spur economic growth and more firmly put 6.1 million rural Mozambicans on a resilient development path.
In Tonga, CIF has supported construction of a two-kilometer seawall to protect coastal communities against storm surges and extreme weather events. In parallel, roads were retrofitted with escape routes away from the coast. Hospitals and schools were also constructed using climate-smart materials and approaches, making them more resilient to storms, and in times of crisis, effective evacuation centers.
CIF has also strived to shift the focus from response and recovery to prevention by strengthening resilience of vulnerable populations, assets, and economies before disaster strikes. For example, in the wake of Hurricane Maria in Dominica, CIF supported the $39.5 million Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project to not only help rebuild infrastructure after storms, but do so using resilient materials and approaches to better prevent future damage. Other interventions included developing information and early warning systems, implementing climate change and disaster risk preparedness campaigns, and building technical and institutional capacity.
PPCR investments demonstrate the value of climate and disaster risk-informed development. When development planning considers potential disaster risks and future climatic changes, we can minimize losses and better achieve development objectives. But much more needs to be done. We need more financing, more commitment, and more ambition to ensure that these development gains are sustained over the long term.
