A positive development for climate adaptation has been found in a new study (2021) by GlocalClim researchers at Mistra Geopolitics and Stockholm University. The study, “International Organizations and Climate Change Adaptation: A New Dataset for the Social Scientific Study of Adaptation, 1990–2017,” discovers that recent decades have witnessed increased engagement in global climate adaptation governance by thirty non-climate international organizations (IOs).
The most recent IPCC report indicates that current efforts to curb the disastrous effects of climate change are inadequate. The pressing need to adapt to climate change by reducing carbon emissions requires effective global governance as national and local efforts alone are insufficient. Such awareness of the need to step up adaptation governance action has been growing, even for international organizations that do not have climate mandates, such as the World Bank (WB) and the World Health Organization (WHO). This was especially the case following the 2007 IPCC report on adaptation and the Bali Action Plan, when this research observed a significant increase in adaptation engagement by IOs.
The study by Ece Kural, Lisa Dellmuth, and Maria-Therese Gustafsson introduces a novel quantitative dataset that measures climate adaptation engagement of IOs. It examines over 2 000 adaptation activities by thirty non-climate international organizations across nine issue areas from 1990 to 2017, confirming earlier case studies suggesting that international organization are increasingly adopting adaptation as a governance goal.
The principal and most striking research finding of the study is that IOs have increasingly engaged in adaptation activities in recent decades, across all observed world regions and all nine non-climate issues areas: disaster risks, global development banking, migration, health, regional cooperation, development, food and agriculture, peace and security, and trade and economy.
However, the observed adaptation engagement has varied considerably: geographically, temporally, across the IOs as well as the issue areas. The most engaged IOs were European organizations, IOs in the Americas, as well as IOs in disaster risk management and development. Whereas global and African organizations and IOs in trade and security were the least engaged.
The researchers highlight that future research could broaden the dataset to include other types of organizations or analyze the causes and consequences of the varied adaptation engagement. Their new dataset also enables comparative analyses of global adaptation governance across space and time and offers the opportunity to link to other relevant adaptation social scientific datasets that are larger in scale to understand how international cooperation could be improved for achieving climate resilience.
Read the study in PLOS ONE “International Organizations and Climate Change Adaptation: A New Dataset for the Social Scientific Study of Adaptation, 1990–2017”
Cite the study: International Organizations and Climate Change Adaptation: A New Dataset for the Social Scientific Study of Adaptation, 1990–2017. Kural, E, Dellmuth LM, Gustafsson M.T.
