Climate risk management (CRM) ensures planning and programming is resilient to current and future climate impacts. To help development practitioners conduct CRM, which applies to all USAID investments in all development sectors, the Agency’s CRM team has worked with Climatelinks to develop a user-friendly portal.
Climatelinks’ new CRM portal provides all the resources needed to assess, address, and adaptively manage climate risks, from initial design stages through implementation. The portal includes:
- Tutorials - A “How to Do Climate Risk Management,” feature, which walks through the whole CRM process, lists resources useful for each phase of CRM, and includes helpful tips and links to online trainings
- Country profiles - Climate risk profiles and GHG emissions factsheets that provide country and region specific information
- Case studies - Examples of managing climate risks to USAID programming
- Training - Resource and training materials including USAID’s Climate Risk Screening and Management Tools; a guide on CRM monitoring, evaluation and learning; FAQs; a 2-hour online training course, a CRM process eLearning tool, and more.
“One purpose of creating a CRM portal is to organize the CRM resources more logically and make them easier to find,” explains Geoffrey Blate, USAID climate change program specialist. “A second purpose is to provide some new resources to better explain the overall process for folks who have not yet engaged with CRM.”
USAID systemically assesses, addresses, and adaptively manages climate risk. In FY 2017, USAID identified climate risks in nearly 80 percent of its programs, with 60 percent of those identifying moderate or high risks. USAID has taken steps to address these moderate and high risks.
“Managing climate risk isn’t hard. We hope that by providing a one-stop shop for resources and guidance, development practitioners will easily be able to apply CRM to their work, making our development efforts more sustainable and effective,” says Becky Chacko, USAID senior climate change integration specialist.