Top down vs bottom up ‘DEC’ integration
While global discussions and agreements on climate, disasters and
development have trickled down to national and local levels in many
countries and a certain degree of improvement has indeed been achieved,
the truth is that, compared to the scale of all three dimensions of the
problems, namely tackling poverty, tackling disasters and preventing
significant climate change impacts, these successes have been
inadequate.
The development, humanitarian and climate change
arenas all have global top down agreements such as the
Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) for development, the
Hyogo Framework for Action
(HFA) for disaster reduction and the
United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for tackling climate change. These global
agreements in turn have top down guidelines to be followed at national
and local level which have been taken up to varying extent over the last
few decades. All three arenas are at a critical turning point with some
important changes being discussed, debated and negotiated over the next
couple of years. Thus for the MDGs which expire in 2015 there are
negotiations currently taking place for a possible replacement with a
set of
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which are due to be agreed
at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September
2015. At the same time the UNFCCC is in a critical phase of intense
negotiations to reach an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol at the
twenty-first conference of parties (COP 21) to be held in Paris in
December 2015. Finally the
HFA is also due for renewal in 2016.
As these top down agreements were discussed and committed to and then
implemented there has also been another bottom up approach in many
countries. In some cases these were by communities themselves such as
the slum dwellers associations in many cities, while in other cases they
were led by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and sometimes by local
and national governments.
However, the bottom up initiatives have
not always received much support from top down global initiatives. Thus
for example the community of practice on community based adaptation
(CBA) recently held its 8th international conference in Kathmandu,
Nepal, where they adopted the Kathmandu Declaration on financing local
adaptation trying to link global funding for adaptation to climate
change to the most vulnerable countries and communities.
In most
developing countries the early focus was on development issues such as
poverty alleviation, health and education and other elements of the
MDGs. This was then followed in many cases by linking disaster risk
reduction to development since so many development investments were lost
due to disasters and lack of
preparedness for those disasters.
While not all disasters were linked to weather and climate (such as
earthquakes) there were many that were (such as floods, droughts and
hurricanes) so the next logical step was to link the DRR elements to
Adaptation to Climate Change (ACC). This linking of disaster risk
reduction to climate change adaptation is still in an early stage while
some countries, such as Bangladesh have made significant progress,
others are still beginning.
Hence the future post 2015 discussion
and global goals and institutions set up or charged to achieve those
goals on the development, disaster risk reduction and climate change
fronts have an opportunity to not only synchronise their goals and
efforts across the three themes, but also to synchronise their efforts
at achieving their goals at global, national and local scales.
The most important way for this aspiration of coherence and harmony
across the scales to be achieved is to allow sufficient time and effort
for the grass roots, community based efforts to be recognised and built
on by the global and national decision makers who hold the purse
strings. Once the commitments are signed and attention turns to action,
we will turn to look at how
integration can happen in practice; this
will be the challenge beyond 2015.