CEA and Climate Change: Using an Established Tool to Address an Emerging Challenge, January 27, 2010

Objectives and Overview

As part of the SDN Forum 2010, a session was organized on addressing climate change issues in country environmental analysis (CEA). The purpose of the workshop was to: (i) Present how climate change issues are being addressed in CEAs; and (ii) Explore the value of CEA as an analytical tool to address climate change. The workshop featured presentations of CEAs that included climate change analysis and a panel discussion of experts from the regional departments.

Key points

Current experiences and lessons learned from addressing climate change in CEAs. The workshop presented three CEAs that addressed climate change: India Northeast Region CEA completed in 2007, Indonesia CEA completed in 2009, and the ongoing Central African Republic (CAR) CEA.  The three CEAs identified climate change as a factor that would impact the growth and development of the country (Indonesia and CAR CEAs) or has implications for the priority sectors (India NE region CEA). The presentations highlighted the different approaches to address climate change, which stemmed from differences in CEA context and objectives, country priorities, and availability and quality of existing data and publications:

• Indonesia CEA identified climate change as a new national priority that is relevant to Indonesia’s development and its three priority areas pertain to climate change adaptation and mitigation: adaptation to climate change, land use, and energy sectors in their relation to climate change mitigation.
• CAR CEA identified growth that is resilient to climate change as one of the CEA priority themes. It analyzed the country’s vulnerability to current climate variability and used this as a starting point to build a forward looking perspective focusing on priority climate change impacts. The CEA also analyzed the institutional capacity issues pertaining to climate change adaptation and mitigation.
• The India Northeast region CEA considered climate change impacts on the identified priority sectors: water and forest resources.

The presentations also highlighted some of the follow up activities that the CEA process and analysis have contributed to, for example: a $300 million climate change development policy loan is being prepared in Indonesia to support the government’s efforts to develop a lower carbon, more climate-resilient growth path. The India North East Region CEA provided basis for dialogue particularly on the water resources and contributed to a $400 million project that is being discussed with the government of India to support the development and management of its northeastern states’ water resources in an optimized manner.  The presenters also highlighted some of the lessons learned that emerged from their experiences:

• Each country provides a different set of challenges and opportunities and it is important to understand the local context within which climate change is being addressed.
• Addressing climate change in CEAs can open the road for dialogue and collaboration on important trans-boundary issues such as water and migration, which could be exacerbated due to climate change impacts in the region and which require international and intra-national cooperation.
• Synthesis of existing climate change information through a CEA with a wider dissemination strategy can be a cost-effective vehicle of coordination and harmonization among donors, stakeholders and decision makers.

Panel discussion on enhancing the value of CEA as an analytical tool to address climate change. A panel discussion highlighted the comparative advantages of CEA in addressing climate change related issues and priorities. The main conclusions of the panel discussion were:

• The climate change angle in CEAs should be used opportunistically.  This means that CEAs may or may not take up the climate change issue and also may treat climate change in different ways (much as the examples illustrated, e.g. to get a better handle of projected climate variability as in Central African Republic, to pull together much existing climate change information and start a new dialogue on it which now is leading to a DPL as in Indonesia, or to look at environmental implications with many lenses, including a climate lens as in the northeast India case.)
• Some CEAs have been used very effectively in the past to bring multiple country stakeholders together to get them to debate and evaluate priorities and to reach consensus on ways forward.  In that regard, the CEA could be the right tool/place to have the debate (involving national stakeholders) on how to better balance the local and global agendas.
• CEAs have a solid reputation for good institutional analysis and are well positioned to assess a country's institutional capacity to handle climate change related issues (which could be done as part of CEA Building Block II - broad assessment of environmental policies and institutions).  It was noted that the various climate change tools lacked the analytical approach to institutional assessment that is offered by the CEA, so incorporation in the CEA methodology would have real value-added. 
• The CEA toolkit should be better linked with the various climate change toolkits, so TTLs realized that these tools could be used synergistically, rather than loading any one instrument with multiple objectives. 
• The CAR CEA presentation on the priority setting step highlighted how the analysis extended the genuine savings methodology to bring in environmental health related costs (using COED methodology) under human capital. Given the importance that is being attached to using this methodology in the context of sustainable growth paths in the Environment Strategy, it is important to explore approaches to further build on this work.