Integrating Climate Risk Management Across the Entire Governmental System in Cambodia

In 2016, PlanAdapt supported the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the General Secretariat of the National Council for Sustainable Development, in collaboration with GIZ, in prioritising and selecting activities to foster the successful implementation of  the National Adaptation Plan. The team, led by PlanAdapt, supported 14 line ministries in understanding the required steps to develop more detailed costing structures of their Climate Change Action Plans (CCAP) and assessed the robustness of cost estimations made. Building on these consultations, PlanAdapt developed a screening and prioritisation methodology in order to select 40 priority actions of a wide range of proposed actions. The criteria used comprised the following, aligning to core criteria of international adaptation funds:

• Impact potential. The long-list actions were screened in terms of their direct, tangible impacts on the ground favoring vulnerable/affected population groups, as opposed to activities that require a lot of intermediate steps to generate mid-term outcomes.
• Transformation potential/ “Paradigm shift”. Actions that cover significant elements of policy and strategy development and which generate climate-specific knowledge and information systems were prioritized. These have the potential to trigger systemic change as compared to more localized changes in pilot-projects.

  

• Sustainable development potential. Actions that have the potential to generate direct economic opportunities beyond just reducing the potential damage and loss due to climate-related impacts, and actions offering environmental co-benefits (i.e. following the paradigms of green growth) were pre-selected. Projects considering gender issues were also prioritized.
• Needs of recipients. From the long-list, actions that have: (i) a leading institution with capacities in place to successfully implement projects and with previous experience with climate-related activities; and (ii) a potential to build capacity were all prioritized.
• Effectiveness/Efficiency. In the absence of any economic analysis for most of the actions in the CCAPs’ long-list, ‘cost per beneficiary’ was used as proxy indicator for efficiency.

148 actions spanning across all sectors of the governmental system were accordingly assessed and ranked. The prioritisation laid the groundwork for the Cambodia National Adaptation Plan Financing Framework (NAPFF) and Implementation Plan, that was approved in 2017. This document builds on an analysis of financial demand and gaps from the existing Cambodia Climate Change Strategic Plan (CCCSP) 2014-2023, sectoral Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs), existing relevant documents and key interviews with line ministries, national stakeholder consultations, and an examination of the international climate finance landscape.

Among the activities selected were the following:

• Promoting climate resilience of agriculture through building and maintaining sea dikes in coastal areas;
• Developing crop variety suitable to agro-ecological zones and resilient to climate change;
• Climate-proofing community irrigation development to enhance agricultural production of paddy field in four communes of Mekong Delta, District Kampong Ro, Svay Rieng Province;
• Promoting post-harvest technology for cereals and tuber crops and conducting research and transfer appropriate post-harvest technologies;
• Promoting aquaculture production systems and practices that are resilient to climate change;
• Improving capacity for flood and drought forecasting and modelling for technical offices at national and sub-national level.

In 2017, PlanAdapt continued its support to the General Secretariat of the National Council for Sustainable Development by drafting the National Adaptation Plan Process document. The document summarizes the climate change vulnerability and impacts, the main process, institutional landscape, activities, financing and resource mobilization and monitoring and evaluation system that constitute the NAP process in Cambodia. It also presents the way forward to scale up adaption efforts in the country.