The World Bank Group has launched its Action Plan on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience. As an institution that is committed to development, the World Bank has an enormous responsibility to help countries and communities act early, to build resilience to what we know they are going to be facing – more frequent and more dramatic climate disasters because of climate change.
In fact, over the past 30 years, more than 2.5 million people and almost $4 trillion have been lost to disasters caused by natural hazards, with global losses quadrupling from $50 billion a year in the 1980s to $200 billion in the last decade, reaching $330 billion in global losses in 2017.
The World Bank’s Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty report finds that almost 75% of the losses are attributable to extreme weather events, and climate change threatens to push an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.
Mainstreaming disaster risk management into development planning can reverse the current trend of rising disaster impact, and when countries rebuild stronger, faster and more inclusively after disasters, they can reduce the impact on people’s livelihoods and well-being by as much as 31%.
In the Action Plan, the World Bank commits:
- On money to bring our financing for adaptation to about the same level as financing for mitigation for the first time,
- On mainstreaming adaptation in countries’ development plans, and
- To measure adaptation properly.
In this blog series on Adaptation and Resilience as part of our Sustainable Communities blog series, we’ll explore how the World Bank is operationalizing the Action Plan.
Related links:
- Press Release: World Bank Group Announces $50 billion over Five Years for Climate Adaptation and Resilience
- Report: Action Plan on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
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- Follow @WBG_Cities on Twitter
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