Coping options

While it is essential that continuing efforts are made to mitigate the primary cause of climate change by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, for the water resources sector the main focus needs to be on “adaptation” to the effects of climate variability and change. The Coping Compendium (Table 1) is an attempt to draw together options available to water managers seeking to adapt to the challenges of climate variability and climate change. It is presented as a menu of activities, described only by brief titles. In many cases, the listed activity is linked to one or more of the 18 Dialogues. In that way, readers can find more information about how the activity relates to climate concerns in those specific circumstances, by referring to
the Yellow Pages, or via the appropriate full Dialogue report. The individual Dialogue reports are available via the DWC website (www.waterandclimate.org). DWC presents the Compendium as a starting point for what it hopes will become a handbook for practitioners and a start-up tool for future dialogues. Readers of the report are encouraged to supplement the Compendium by contributing their own experiences of coping options, to help build up a dossier of case studies. Responses to the impacts of climate variability and climate change involve coping actions at many different levels. Internationally, treaties, conventions and global accords are the foundation for concerted action to mitigate global warming. Regional cooperation and transboundary agreements provide a basis for better management of international rivers to prepare for and alleviate extreme events. Information sharing, early warning systems, climate forecasting and modelling all help water managers to prepare coping strategies. But it is on the ground, in the individual river basins and communities, that the vital coping actions have to be taken. The strong message going out to governments, donors and disaster relief agencies is that locally planned, locally managed adaptation to changing climatic circumstances is practical, beneficial and cost effective.

In the Coping Compendium, adaptation options are divided into four categories:

Policy instruments
Technological and structural instruments
Risk sharing and spreading
Change of use, activity or location

A further heading: Knowledge, skills and participation lists activities intended to increase the adaptive capacity of the country or community initiating a coping strategy.

Policy instruments

Over the centuries, societies and ecosystems have adapted to climate variability and climate change in an evolutionary way. Today, the rapidity of changes in hydrological regimes requires more immediate and
more concerted efforts. Policies and operating rules focused on optimum exploitation of available water resources need to be adjusted. The hydrological rules have changed. Continually updated assessments of meteorological and hydrological data need to be an integral part of water resources planning and management. That is rarely the case now. A fundamental aspect of any coping strategy therefore must be mainstreaming of climate issues into national
water management policy. At the global level, the International Convention on Climate Change is influential in stimulating follow-up action at regional and national scales, so its principles and recommendations carry significant weight. The dialogues in West Africa and the Caribbean Islands both call for stronger representation in the processes of the Convention. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations have emerged as important in determining a nation’s ability to cope (highlighted in the Bangladesh and Mediterranean Dialogues). It is higher level politics that will largely determine what happens in this arena, but with the implications for water-use changes implied by freer global food markets, water and climate issues need to be on the WTO agenda. Regional initiatives can bring economies of scale and often a high level of political will. Regional Adaptation Plans of Action are now being actively pursued in five
of the eight Dialogue regions. At national level, waterand- climate is a cross-cutting issue affecting many aspects of social and economic development. Poverty reduction and sustainable development are the two most obvious targets for mainstreaming climate issues, because of the threats to progress in these areas from extreme weather events.

Technological and structural instruments

The list of coping options under this heading in the Compendium will seem to many readers like a catalogue of obvious water management operations and forecasting techniques. It is true that, in most cases, coping with climate need not involve many innovative or new processes. What it does mean is reviewing existing water management operations in the light of today’s hydrological circumstances. In doing so, managers will move a long way towards
coping with future climate changes. A first condition for effective coping should be the existence of forecasting and early warning systems based on short to medium-term weather forecasts and up-to-date hydrological information and linked to an effective disaster-preparedness organisation. Regrettably, such systems are too often not in place. They require a high level of local participation and credibility, as well as a strong network for data gathering and dissemination. The Flood Vulnerability Reduction and Development of Local Warning Systems programme in Central America, featured in the Small Valleys Dialogue, shows that such systems can be relatively cost efficient. Another example is the advanced early warning system operational in Bangladesh (see box), which expresses hydrological data about impending floods in ways that can help to determine basin-wide impacts. DWC also reports flood early warning systems in Europe, and a community-operated early warning system in Guatemala. Seasonal up to inter-annual prediction systems are especially relevant for agriculture. Regional and local seasonal predictions are being improved and successfully linked to agricultural extension in, for example, Brazil, southern Africa and the Indonesian archipelago. Climate forecasting tools are getting better, covering longer and shorter time horizons and larger and more local spatial scales. At regional level and for long time scales, climatologists are now able to produce weather forecasts of modest accuracy particularly for the tropics, though there remain substantial uncertainties in climate projections, particularly for the higher and lower latitudes. The 1997/98 El Niño events were the first to be detected and made known through alerts to a network of organisations in many regions of the world and this led to significant savings in lives and property. Although long-term climate scenarios cannot meet the operational needs of today's water managers, short and medium-term weather and climate forecasts can be of huge benefit. Further improvement in short-term forecasting (3, 15, 30 and 90-days) is seen as one of the more important technological breakthroughs that will improve adaptive capacity. However, these forecasts are not yet being used in many parts of the world in water management, partly for lack of capacity, but also because the potential has not yet been realised by water managers. Increased storage is a logical option to cope with changing hydrological parameters (rainfall and runoff).

New dams and reservoirs are not always a popular solution though. They raise controversies over environmental and resettlement issues and have been blamed for spreading vector-borne diseases like schistosomiasis and malaria. In December 2000, the World Commission on Dams produced a comprehensive report Dams and Development: A New framework for Decision-Making, promoting five "core values" – equity, sustainability, efficiency, participatory
decision-making, and accountability. The framework and guidelines are to guide projects for new construction and for rehabilitation of dams, but they have not yet factored in climate change/variability. Alternative storage options that need to be explored in this context are ground water storage and rainwater harvesting.

Boosting groundwater storage through aquifer recharge can have advantages over surface water storage, because of the reduction in evaporation losses. By way of example, if 50% of the surface water storage for the supply of Windhoek, Namibia, was transferred to underground storage, the decrease in evaporative losses would equal about 60% of the water demand of Windhoek. Water for aquifer recharge may be diverted urban stormwater runoff, irrigation return flows or, with appropriate controls, reused municipal wastewater. At local level, rainwater harvesting is growing in popularity as a cost-effective way for the unserved poor to obtain improved water supplies. It has the additional benefit that it adds to the resilience of community water supplies. For cities and coastal regions susceptible to floods and/or storm surges, each disastrous event prompts a review of control structures. River bed deepening and widening, diversion channels and extra flood basins are among the protection measures that are normally recommended. Raising flood embankments (dikes) is a common, if expensive solution. It can also be a risky one, as future overtopping and failure of raised flood defences will add to the perils of those "protected" by them. In the light of increasing risks of extreme events,
the effectiveness of these “solutions” needs to be critically reassessed. Other coping options may well be more effective. For example, the disaster shelters constructed in Bangladesh after the 1991 cyclone killed 140,000 people are considered to have been very effective in saving lives during later storm surges.

Risk sharing and spreading

New insurance products and mechanisms are constantly under development. Crop insurance and microinsurance mechanisms are providing risk transfer to individual (often poor) farmers and other groups who lack access to traditional formal insurance and finance. Both Morocco and Cambodia are investigating and piloting a risk management approach to alleviate loss of agricultural income due to natural hazards. The Government of South Africa is in the process of debating legislation to stimulate a market in crop insurance. Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds against government-run multi-peril crop insurance programmes for the small scale, traditional or subsistence farmers, there are a growing number of specialists who believe that a modified crop insurance scheme for small farmers can be developed and implemented in a viable and sustainable manner. At household level, microfinance enables families and groups to rebuild economic activities and livelihoods after disasters and to help themselves out of poverty.

For example, in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank lends US$30 million a month to 1.8 million borrowers, BRAC provides loans of between 1000 thakas (US$20) and Tk 20,000 (US$400). Governments provide several types of support for disaster response, with workfare programmes successfully maintaining livelihoods for affected people (e.g. Frente de Trabalho in North-Eastern Brazil), providing employment in periods of drought.Not all forms of risk-spreading involve money. Farmers have traditionally dealt with risk by spreading their resources. They have always taken steps to build-in their own insurance through their cropping and planting strategies, careful that one failure will not prove to be a catastrophe. It is an approach that can be developed and enhanced by better forecasting and co-operative action with support for alternative crops and planting schedules.

Change of use, activity or location

Sea level rise, shrinking natural lakes and desertification all force changes of land-use and livelihoods. The increasing susceptibility of flood plains to extreme events means that governments have to consider prescriptive spatial and land-use planning as a coping option. In some cases, like the examples of the Netherlands and Japan described in the main reports Yellow Pages (Chapter 4), coping measures include an a priori acceptance of some degree of risk and controlled damage, as opposed to maximum protection. With increasing climate variability and future climate change, “living with floods and droughts” is likely to become a much more common coping strategy. Resettlement is neither popular nor desirable, but it may eventually become inevitable. In the Dialogues it became clear that, even in bottom-up strategic planning, switching livelihood practices could not be excluded.

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