Enabler 1

Policy and leadership contributing to visioning, goals, targets and outcomes

Overview

Our first enabler is the presence of policies and political leadership that can help to set goals, targets and outcomes for adapting to climate change. This means having the policies and legislation in place that set out what we hope to achieve when we talk about adapting to climate change. It also means ensuring that our policy and legislation across a broad range of areas – public health, transport, food, social welfare – have climate change adaptation embedded within them in a coherent way.

It is important to ensure that sectoral and other policies do not undermine, but rather reinforce and offer synergies to increase our adaptive capacity to climate change.

Having these goals, targets and outcomes is important so that we are all clear on what we are hoping to achieve, and how we will know when we have achieved it. Policies and legislation can also lend legitimacy to actors and indicate institutional mandates for driving and supporting adaptation.

  What does this enabler involve?

1. Conducive national policies and legislation: our national policies and legislation must support adaptation progress. This encompasses both adaptation-specific policy and legislation, such as national adaptation plans, and the full range of policy areas that are necessary to support adaptation, both sectoral such as infrastructure or environment, or enabling such as planning, decentralisation or community empowerment. These need to set out the key risks and priority responses, as well as the duties and responsibilities of the people implementing the policies and legislation. Adaptation policies and legislation should be gender responsive – as stated in the Paris Agreement.
2. Integration of adaptation across sectors and scales: we need clear institutional mandates for adaptation at different levels and across different sectors, as well as an understanding of how adaptation integrates with disaster risk management, climate mitigation, social protection and humanitarian responses. Clear instructions and mechanisms should link our climate change adaptation actions with a whole suite of other aspects that affect daily life, such as poverty eradication, agriculture, health, and food and nutrition. We also need processes that enable national targets and initiatives on adaptation to be connected to what is happening at the local government level.
3. Valuing local realities: We must recognise the crucial role local realities play in adaptation planning. National policies and legislation must legitimise the importance of building on and reflecting local realities. This requires leadership and policy that value and recognize the importance of bringing together science, expertise, and lived and community experience to understand and respond to climate action.
4. Transparency and accountability across sectors and scales: It is important that we have transparency among public bodies when it comes to reporting and sharing their information across sectors, with good opportunities for us to scrutinise and assess the risks associated with climate change adaptation across different areas of policy and legislation.
5. Leadership and ‘champions’ driving adaptation processes forwards: Our adaptation actions require people, or the organisations they work for, who are able to take the lead in setting the adaptation goals we want to achieve. This may include champions within government or other organisations and at a range of levels. Leaders and champions should be representative of all groups in society, including different genders, and leaders in inclusive, gender responsive and age-sensitive ways.

 What drives this enabler forward?

1. We need governments, businesses and civil society to support policy and legislation for climate change, as well as appropriate levels of funding to realise these plans and long-term stability in policies.
2. We also require mechanisms and incentives to integrate climate change adaptation into long-term planning across other areas of policy, and to implement policies and programmes at smaller scales of government. Having clear mandates and roles for governments working at different levels will help to enable this.
3. We need independent assessments, and the ability of our citizens to understand and engage with what is being planned.
4. People within our organisations who have the skills and motivation to be able to work across different sectors within governments, and across society.

 What might inhibit this enabler from being realised?

1. A lack of clear responsibilities and mandates between the government, businesses, third sector organisations, and the public.
2. A lack of coherent policy, with different policy areas relating to different areas of life, or across different levels of government, addressing climate change adaptation in isolation.
3. The scale and pace at which climate change impacts are escalating might overtake our capacity to respond if our policies, legislation and goals are not flexible enough to respond quickly.
4. Processes to set policies that are dominated by elites, not, inclusive, gender-responsive and age sensitive and are resistant to the voices of local people and wider society.