Link national strategies with local realities to achieve climate resilience
New WRT Knowledge Brief provides tools, approaches and real-world examples
Action to create resilience to climate change impacts often takes place where impacts are felt: at the level of communities, cities, watersheds and river basins exposed to climate-induced extreme events like floods and droughts, heat stress and water quality degradation.
On the other hand, planning for resilient systems starts at the national policy level. Around 80% of National Adaptation Plans consider water to some extent, setting high-level ambitions for water security and resilience, but their implementation, translating aspirations into relevant actions at different governance levels, remains a challenge.
Scaling Water and Climate Resilience: Tools to Link National Strategies to Local Realities shows how this challenge can be overcome. It provides a clear diagnostic and five-step approach, drawing from the experiences of the Water Resilience Tracker and the many other approaches that have been applied at the sub-national level.
The two-way challenge
National climate adaptation plans often fail to reflect the realities of local water systems, governance capacities, and community vulnerabilities. Likewise, it is not easy for locally grounded stakeholders to contribute to the formulation and achievementof national policies. Local institutions may not have sufficient information, mandate, capacity, or resources to feed their experiences into policy and monitoring systems, while national decision-makers need mechanisms to meaningfully take these local perspectives into account. As a result, national policies rarely include clear, relevant and actionable guidance for the local level, which prevents them from achieving their ambitions.
The approach
To close this gap, countries need to ensure a coherent two-way process that connects national commitments to basin, coastal and city action, while elevating priorities from the community and district levels.
Tools like the Water Resilience Tracker (WRT) are used typically at the national level to diagnose how water is addressed across climate planning and across the many sectors impacted by water. However, it has also been adapted for use at the sub-national level in countries like Brazil, Egypt and Nepal, providing a way to connect local and national priorities and actions.
The WRT is not the only approach, however. Several other tools that have proven successful at the sub-national level include the City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA), Water as Leverage (WaL), Strategic Water System Planning, Digital Innovation for a Water-Secure Africa (DIWASA), and Voluntary Local Reviews.
These tools can be connected to support better multi-sector coordination and multi-level governance, closing the gap between national priorities and locally relevant implementation. The important elements to consider in strengthening these linkagesinclude:
1. Diagnose national and local readiness and alignment
The Water Resilience Tracker provides a simple questionnaire used to review how well water is addressed and connected across climate policies of plans. It is used alongside stakeholder consultation workshops to identify priorities and gaps, both at the national and sub-national level. These workshops serve to build mutual understanding and collaboration across sectors and governance levels.
2. Define and co-create local and national resilience mechanisms
National climate ambitions should be grounded in local realities. A good first step is to identify priority regions based on climate vulnerability and socio-economic significance. With local stakeholders, co-designing action plans, projects and water resilience indicators helps create alignment, inclusivity and ownership from the national to the local levels.
3. Establish multi-level and cross-sectoral governance linkages
Coordination across sectors and levels of governance can happen sporadically, but to make a difference it needs to be deliberately supported institutionally and financially. This includes creating legal frameworks, defining roles and responsibilities, and creating shared platforms for data sharing and communication.
4. Align finance across levels
To move from plans to implementation, public and private finance must flow effectively. Cities and local authorities find it especially hard to access climate funds, which are generally allocated for larger projects. Countries around the world have used various approaches to unblock funding flows to local levels, for example bundling into one portfolio multiple smaller projects that all support resilience in different ways or in different places.
5. Create learning and feedback loop opportunities for ongoing dialogue and alignment
Learning and knowledge exchange, informed by monitored outcomes, critically needs to be maintained among stakeholders at multiple levels on a continual basis. Participative feedback mechanisms such as validation and learning workshops engage a diverse set of stakeholders in evaluating impact and in improving future trajectories in an iterative way. Lessons from local implementation can influence the revision of national policies so that they improve over time.