Strengthening resilience and climate adaptation in conflict and fragile settings: towards effective action

This brief aims to show that tailored interventions are feasible even in constrained environments. It outlines some of the characteristics that critically influence the response in different situations of fragility and conflict, highlights constraints to this response, and provides examples of success from Burundi, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. The brief closes with a series of outstanding questions and recommendations for those actors who are instrumental to a scaled-up climate action in these settings.

Published two years after Embracing Discomfort first called for action at COP27 to close the conflict blind spot in climate finance, this brief provides a solutions-focused guide for climate and development actors, humanitarian organisations and researchers to explore avenues to scale up climate action in countries affected by conflict and fragility.

Key messages of this brief, include:

• The costs of inaction – both human and financial – will continue to rise. Inadequate action contributes to a continued and widening gap in adaptive capacities between communities affected by conflict and fragility, and others. This amplifies the development deficit that exists in these settings and, as climate hazards become more severe, frequent and unpredictable, exacerbates its consequences.
• Interventions that respond to climate action provide common goods and benefits. Building adaptive capacity by supporting people’s livelihoods and access to services, strengthening social safety nets, and providing early warnings yields dividends to communities and countries, not only to populations receiving assistance. Thinking of climate action in this way can help to reframe the costs and risks, and therefore, strengthen the case for scaled up action in conflict and fragile settings.
• Even in very complex settings, possibilities exist. The examples of action included in this brief represent a cross-section of existing programmes with strong climate components. Similar interventions exist across the spectrum of fragile and conflict settings. Scaling up action in these settings starts with supporting, adapting and expanding existing initiatives. Communities themselves, authorities, development actors and humanitarian organisations can help policymakers to identify entry points and projects that could be adapted with additional support to more substantively address climate risks.