UNDP's Louisa Vinton on building a climate-resilient country
By Louisa Vinton, UNDP Resident Representative in Georgia
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The devastation caused by the 2015 floods was a wake-up call for Georgia’s authorities. They recognized that the unprecedented rains that caused the flooding were merely a first taste of the havoc that climate change is set to wreak. Spurred into action by the disaster, they began a quest for solutions to protect people and property from the impact of climate-driven disasters.
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The risks are growing as the extreme weather events that are a consequence of climate change, such as the torrential rains that caused the Tbilisi floods in 2015, hit the country with increasing frequency and severity. Scientists now estimate that climate-driven disasters could cost Georgia as much as $12 billion over the next ten years. That’s 80% of current annual GDP.
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Fortunately, Georgia is not sitting idle in the face of these challenges. Thanks to a program launched in 2019, Georgia is enacting the policies and undertaking the investments needed to adapt to climate change and protect the entire country from climate-driven disasters. The initiative is a joint venture between the government and UNDP, with the total $70 million in funding coming from the government itself ($38 million); the Green Climate Fund ($27 million); and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation ($5 million).
The program aims to replace the reactive approach traditional in Georgia, in which the state pays for compensation and reconstruction after each successive disaster, to one fully grounded in PREVENTION. Rejecting the fatalistic conviction that disasters are inevitable because “you can’t change the weather,” it assumes that, with proper preparation and investment, Georgia can prevent even the most extreme weather events from turning into disasters. This takes money, of course, but as a rule each dollar invested in prevention saves seven dollars in recovery costs.
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