Incorporating Climate Change Adaptation into Sustainable Development

While many developing countries are facing the immediate needs of adapting changing climate, climate change adaptation is still smaller size at global level but it has high potential to maximize its positive impact by connecting diverse relevant sectors. Overall trend in Korea’s aid as well as KOICA’s support in terms of budgeting larger volume has been allocated to climate change adaptation than mitigation. It signifies KOICA has already entered into the initial stage of mainstreaming adaptation. Still its climate change strategy remains on introductory level. The strategy does not cover practical issues particularly relating to project designing. As found in the Section 3 and 4, Korea overall as well as KOICA has spent more budget on adaptation. It can be translated into high potential to advance mainstreaming climate change adaptation.

However, the level of addressing adaptation in project designing is not much advanced., KOICA’s adaptation support is highly concentrated to a few of particular sectors. This would be a challenging factor to diversify KOICA’s adaptation mainstreaming. To do this, it needs to analyze at first existing portfolio of climate change support and focus on the sectors which are not yet connected with adaptation. KOICA then needs to explore sectoral adaptation measures. Such measures are already available and introduced in policy dialogue as well as at practical level particularly by other donor agencies as well as UNFCCC and IPCC. By referring to practices of other adaptation oriented DAC members having balanced portfolio, KOICA is expected to learn how to advance its adaptation approach in their project designing.