Climate Month
Climate Month is our recognition of the growing global concern around climate change, and our effort to highlight the innovative solutions in place and under development to build resilience to a warming climate. Climate Month begins with the Foundation's participation in the UN's COP17 Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Cristina Rumbaitis Del Rio, Associate Director, is in Durban and will be reporting back from the conference and related events.
COP17 & Beyond
In the last part of our Climate Month series I want to answer the questions on the outcomes of COP17, climate resilience, and the Rockefeller Foundation that you sent us through Facebook, Twitter and our website. Thank you to all who wrote in. I hope my answers will encourage you to keep the discussion alive over the course of the next year, leading up to COP 18.
Please continue to follow us on Facebook and Twitter; we will keep sending out interesting facts about climate change and what we all can do to build resilience globally and locally.
Best,
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio
Associate Director
@cristina_rdr
Reflections on COP17
Cristina Rumbaitis Del Rio
COP17 in Durban came to a close in double overtime last Sunday, and while the global community didn’t walk away with as ambitious an international agreement as I had hoped, negotiators did make some progress. An agreement was reached for countries to keep working towards a climate agreement that would have an outcome with legal force by 2020 at the latest.
Additionally, there were a few smaller, but important victories that were achieved in Durban last week. Negotiators reached an agreement on the Green Climate Fund, which will deliver important public and private resources to developing countries to help them build resilience to the impacts of climate change, as well as invest in low carbon development.
Horizon over Durban
A technical committee to the convention recommended the formation of a special working group on agriculture and climate change – recognizing the special importance of meeting food security needs under a changing climate, and the need to invest in climate smart agriculture to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. It was thrilling to see this issue receiving greater attention at the international level. Learn more >
In my days on the ground in Durban, I witnessed a noticeable increase in interest around resilience building strategies that governments on the local and regional level are implementing – strategies that could serve as models for the rest of the world. In an effort to maintain the momentum around adaptation and resilience, I would like to highlight some of the announcements that the Foundation and our grantees made throughout COP17.
Ad from SA Environment Ministry found all over Durban
On December 3rd, The Rockefeller Foundation was thrilled to co-sponsor Agriculture and Rural Development day, an event that brought together policy makers, farmers, scientists and development experts to discuss the urgent need for rural communities in developing countries to play a greater role and receive stronger support in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Our Africa Regional Office Managing Director Dr. James Nyoro spoke during a plenary session recapping the many ways in which climate smart agriculture can be achieved. He highlighted an innovative partnership between Oxfam-America and the World Food Programme, which is helping cash poor farmers invest in climate resilience measures and providing them with crop insurance to help confront bad weather years. Dr. Nyoro spoke following the honorable Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and the Chair of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice. Her powerful reframing of food security and climate as a human right was inspirational. She said: “A situation where almost a billion people go hungry every day, where a further billion are malnourished, is an affront to us all.” Read full quote >
Display of lettuce growing in a water efficient system
While food security is a central concern, we must not forget that urban dwellers, particularly the poor, will need support to build resilience to the impacts of climate change. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network – a network aimed at facilitating the development of robust plans to prepare for, withstand and recover from the predicted impacts of climate change in 10 urban areas in Thailand, Vietnam, India and Indonesia - launched a new report with the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition entitled “Catalyzing Urban Climate Resilience”. The report highlights critical lessons learned through the implementation of ACCCRN in an effort to achieve a replicable model for resilience building. The report was launched at the ICLEI Local Government Convention, where local, sub-national and regional governments pledged to accelerate their adaptation efforts by mainstreaming adaptation in local government planning.
Also, I encourage you to read the Financial Times’ This Is Africa special report entitled COP17: Turning Talk into Action in Durban. The report, published with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, offers real insights and in depth reporting on issues related to climate change, as well as interviews and perspectives from some of the leading players in the space, including Christina Figueres, the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Yvo De Boer, KPMG’s special global advisor on climate change and sustainability, and our very own President Dr. Judith Rodin, who authored an op-ed that argued that the COP should be used as an occasion to move beyond discussions towards practical implementation.
Finally, even though the COP17 has come to an end, climate month has not! We will be continuing to update our website and reach out to you via twitter and facebook on important news and issues related to climate resilience and our grantees. Additionally, I encourage you to keep this important discussion alive. I would love to answer any questions you may have on COP17, climate resilience, and The Rockefeller Foundation and our grantees. Please connect with your questions through our Foundation Facebook page, Twitter or the Rockefeller Foundation website. Next week, in a brief video message, I will answer some of your questions and give my point of view about how we can all think about climate resilience over the course of the next year.
Until then,
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio
Associate Director
Reporting from COP 17 in Durban
Cristina Rumbaitis Del Rio
December is Climate Month at the Rockefeller Foundation, and for the first time since our founding in 1913 we will begin a month-long tribute to climate adaptation and resilience. We are doing this for two main reasons: first to showcase the work of our grantees in this area; and second to begin a conversation on the issue of climate resilience that we hope extends far beyond December.
On November 28th the attention of the entire global community turned to Durban, South Africa for two weeks for COP17, or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Seventeenth Conference of Parties. Since 1995 the UNFCCC has convened the international community to cooperatively consider what they could do to mitigate climate change and to manage its impacts. Since then, the COP has met once a year to drive global climate agreements forward, commit financing, and assess progress in dealing with climate change.
2011 marks a seminal year for the COP. The Kyoto protocol – a landmark international agreement to cut carbon emissions which been a significant focus of the COP in years past - expires in 2012, and leaders in Durban will focus their efforts on adopting a new international framework for climate change mitigation. And while we are eager for a new framework to be established, we are realistic in our expectations. We have been disappointed before, most recently at COP meetings in Copenhagen and Cancun.
Perhaps even more importantly to the Rockefeller Foundation is that with the COP back in Africa - for the first time since 2006 – we have a real opportunity to focus the discussion and the decision making on how to build the resilience of communities that are already feeling the impact of extreme weather because of climate change.
RF staff at COP 17 in Durban
Guided by our dual mission to build resilience and promote growth with equity, the Foundation focuses on building resilient communities that are able to weather the effects of climate change. In 2007, we launched our climate change resilience initiative – a $90 million commitment which focuses on urban environments in Asia, agriculture in Africa, policy research, and replication efforts. In Africa, our climate change resilience work is focused on helping smallholder farmers adapt to more extreme and difficult to manage weather patterns. For example, in Ethiopia, we support Oxfam America's work to provide some of the poorest farmers in the country with access to crop insurance through an innovative program that allows farmers to trade work for insurance. In southern Africa, drought tolerant maize developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center – a Rockefeller Foundation grantee - is transforming growing seasons – with a 25-30% increase in yields.
To help rapidly growing cities in Asia develop resilience plans to help them prepare for the current and future impact of climate change, the Foundation formed the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN). This network helps city managers and key stakeholders in 10 Asian cities develop and identify best practices for manageable, resilient urban growth and develop effective, agile ways to implement those practices, with a focus on improving the resilience of poor and vulnerable populations.
A baobab tree, the COP 17 symbol
Many ACCCRN cities are fast growing coastal cities, particularly vulnerable to climate change and in desperate need of adaptation strategies. For example, Surat, India has a population of over four million and is built on the River Tapti. Through the ACCCRN process, the city developed climate projections that suggested more intense and frequent rainfall, leading to rising river discharges on the Tapti. As a result the city linked the agencies responsible for upstream dam management (a federal responsibility) with downstream disaster management (under state authority). Now these actors, along with the Municipal Corporation, development authorities, catchment managers, and rainfall forecasting units and a local university are coordinating to form an early warning system to warn citizens of potentially catastrophic flooding.
Our climate change resilience work, focused at the local and regional level, proves that building real adaptive capacity to climate change is possible. So, as government leaders, climate experts, and representatives of the private sector discuss and debate the future of an international climate change framework in Durban, we hope that the COP community also focuses on the success that local governments and communities have already achieved in resilience-building and will find pathways to support and scale these innovations.
As we set out to mark Climate Month at the Rockefeller Foundation, we hope that the COP sparks a discussion around climate change resilience that continues through the month of December and well into the months and years ahead. We further hope that the international community comes together and develops fair distribution mechanisms that allow funding to flow into local hands and toward projects that we know already work.
So please join me in making December Climate Month: engage with your online communities, share with us your climate work, and drive the discussion forward. I encourage you to follow me as I tweet throughout all of COP17 and Climate Month - @cristina_rdr.
Best,
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio
Associate Director