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Climate Change Pillar: Adaptation
 Men caring for a mangrove in Davao City. Photo: USAID
Adaptation refers to efforts to deal with the impacts of current climate variability and future climate change. Climate change is already leading to rising temperatures, increased rainfall variability, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes in extreme weather events. In USAID’s partner countries, climate change threatens to undermine development progress, as the impacts add additional stresses on water resources, coastal zones, ecosystems, population centers, farming and other rural livelihoods, and human and animal health.
USAID’s adaptation programs seek to build resilience to climate change in the most vulnerable countries. Working with developing country partners and other U.S. Government agencies, USAID pursues linked efforts that involve all development sectors, including agriculture and agricultural research, natural resources management, health, energy and infrastructure, and communications and decision support tools, such as early warning systems and other climate services.
Recognizing the importance of scientific capacity and broader access to high-quality climate information for the targeting and design of adaptation strategies, USAID is also supporting new information platforms and decision-making tools, and building capacity to apply climate information to enable sound planning for climate resilience.
USAID has developed a series of Adaptation Guidance Manuals and Case Studies to help guide development professionals in assessing vulnerability and designing effective adaptation programs.
Linked documents may require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing.
USAID Manuals
USAID Case Studies
USAID Examples
The SERVIR and FEWS NET programs described below are two examples of USAID’s work to provide access to timely information for climate change adaptation. Another example of USAID’s adaptation work is a collaboration with The Mountain Institute, a global conservation organization that helps mountain communities adapt and build resilience to climate change impacts. This collaboration resulted in a workshop in Peru that brought together scientists, policy makers, and community members to examine the implications of diminishing glaciers for freshwater supplies.
SERVIR
USAID and NASA support SERVIR, a Regional Visualization and Monitoring System that integrates satellite and other geospatial data for improved scientific knowledge and decision making by managers, researchers, students, and the general public. This includes support for two hubs in the Latin America/Caribbean and East Africa regions that collect and process climate information, test innovative tools, and apply that information to development challenges, such as weather prediction, fire monitoring, red tides, and disaster response. Efforts are underway to apply the SERVIR model to other regions to support climate-resilient development.
SERVIR also includes the Climate Mapper tool, developed by USAID and its partners, which makes historical weather records and the results of climate models accessible to a broad user community. Users can access climate change projections for the 2030s and 2050s against 3-D visualizations of landscape.
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)
USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) is a set of integrated activities joining USAID with a team comprised of a private-sector contractor, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), that provides early warning of environmental (e.g. drought) and socioeconomic conditions and hazards (e.g. agricultural production, livelihood zoning, food prices), and regularly monitors and assesses the current and future vulnerabilities to food insecurity for more than 25 countries on its web site. FEWS NET is a major contributor to the capacity-building of national and regional early warning and food security monitoring and assessment systems.
Since 2005, FEWS NET has extended its deep data resources and expertise in the monitoring of weather and agricultural conditions to identify and examine potential national-level patterns of climate change in food insecure areas. These patterns are then studied to identify their links with regional, continental, and global drivers of climate change and to specify the most likely evolution of their impacts on food security. This work is intended to provide better predictive capabilities for early warning, as well as critical insights upon which to base the design of adaptation efforts.
FEWS NET’s climate change work is principally carried out by its USGS team in collaboration with the Climate Hazards Group of the University of California at Santa Barbara and is also linked to the efforts of the NOAA/USGS National Drought Information System (NIDIS) in Boulder Colorado. FEWS NET has published a substantial amount of peer-reviewed literature on current patterns of climate change in Africa, concentrating on identifying the nature of adaptations that will be required in the near future to mitigate negative food security impacts in food insecure areas.
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