The article, International Organizations and Climate Change Adaptation, Volume 1 is a research article. It proposes a data set on the climate change adaptation activities by International Organizations (IOs) from 1990 to 2017. The author of this article is Lisa Maria Dellmuth and the co-authors, Ece Kural and Maria-Therese Gustafsson.
The authors said human adaptation to climate change is should recognized as a global goal. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) said that addressing adaptation challenges is also important. As global warming is elevated and the temperature has ascended. This creates the threat of climate change. Although many possible ways exist to encounter this threat. However, they are insufficient. Various sets of risks such as water shortage, food insecurity, and extreme weather events have been caused by climate change. Hence, there is a need for communities should make efforts towards adaptation to this threat. Many IOs are engaged in the adaptation process. Even the non-climate IOs, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization are engaging in adaptation. The work of these IOs includes: collecting funds, arranging staff, and giving funds to adaptation-related projects. Also setting guidelines for local and national adaptation activities. One of the examples authors mentioned, is of United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which plays a crucial role in supporting national adaptation planning in developing countries. The authors make use of the terms activities, structure, and performance to address adaptation engagements by IOs. They particularly mentioned, the European Union (EU), International Organizations for Migration (IOM), United Nations Security Council (UNSC), World Health Organization (WHO), and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) roles. The authors said that although IOs contributed to adaptation engagements, however, these engagements are not mentioned clearly, in their policies. That makes it difficult to address their working in adaptation areas. Therefore, the authors developed a dataset of 30 IOs from their annual report. The focus of the authors for this research is mostly on non-climate IOs and major IOs. They rely on a qualitative approach and utilize primary and secondary sources for their research. They analyzed 697 annual reports and utilized: events, statements, frameworks, funds, operational activities, projects, reports, and institutional changes of IOs. After analyzing the reports, they realized that the reports were a bit complex. Hence, they get ideas from IOs funding and staffing about how willing and serious these IOs are towards adaptation processes.
Finally, the result of reports is, that IOs’ engagements in climate adaptation significantly increase with time. The reports of 1990-2007 show that IOs were not actively engaged in adaptation processes. However, the reports of 2007-2017 show that the engagements of IOs were efficient and remarkable.
It is crucial to highlight the climate change and adaptation-related problems to encounter the threat. And also, to address how these projects, supported by IOs can be successful and how they reduce the fragility of climate change. So, we can take effective measures for future. IOs cooperation, to promote adaptation development methods, should be dynamic, that must be adjusted to the particular necessities.
Reference:
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257101
The writer is a student of “BSIR” at “International Islamic University Islamabad” and a member of PYDIR.