How South Africa’s recent floods compel climate action
South Africa is proactively responding to climate change through adaptation-focused regulation and green energy investments.
The Race to Resilience, launched in January 2021, has developed a metrics framework for non state actors to verify the climate resilience impact of their actions. This new metrics framework, for the first time, allows non state actors to report action, and quantify and verify impact under a common framework.
The scope of Race to Resilience includes people and hectares of natural systems, with a goal of covering gaps in resilience. This implies that for the campaign to be successful, it has to include the most exposed, vulnerable, populous and large regions of the Global South. In contrast, a scope including assets would have the opposite effect.
The focus is on increased resilience. The campaign does not claim that the people and ecosystems benefitting from partner actions are resilient or adapted to climate change, rather the claim is that they have increased resilience to climate change. This is a journey where all and every action matters and adds up to the goal of making 4 billion people more resilient by 2030.
The Center for Climate Resilience Research (CR2) joined the campaign as Technical Secretariat in mid-April 2021, and is responsible for conducting the work on metrics and for consultations with the Methodological Advisory Group (MAG).
Working ad honorem for the campaign and on the basis of several rounds of discussions and feedback with R2R co-leads, the MAG and CR2, McKinsey developed the concept of the metrics framework, and delivered a first draft at the end of May. In June, McKinsey also provided Risk Analytics statistics on exposure of people and natural systems to the main climate hazards.
From a scientific and technical standpoint, when CR2 took over from McKinsey in May, the metrics framework was strengthened along two lines:
The R2R campaign includes two workstreams, on Metrics and on Transformations. In 2021, 25 partner initiatives joined the Metrics workstream. Of these, 17 were in a position to make their pledges for COP26, 14 of which had pledges on the number of individuals with increased resilience to at least one climate hazard by 2030, for an aggregated total number of 2.3 billion people.
Some examples of pledges received:
Future plans
Partner initiatives are committed to reporting every year in two main areas:
These metrics will then be compiled and aggregated by CR2, as well as contrasted with Risk Analytics data on exposure. This for three reasons:
To read more about the metrics framework, please click here.
South Africa is proactively responding to climate change through adaptation-focused regulation and green energy investments.
Communities across the world are coming up with locally-led solutions to help communities adapt to the impacts of climate change.
A new AI-based study compares cities’ trees and lakes to how much concrete they have, to gauge their ability to respond to climate shocks.
The IPCC’s latest report on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability made it explicit that people living in informal settlements are the most vulnerable urban populations to climate change.