This policy session has been organized by CMCC in the framework of the 6th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (WCERE).

Adaptation is not only essential to contrast adverse consequences of climate change, but also increasingly intertwined with countries’ social economic development and sustainability prospects. The fact that all developing countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions presented at the Paris COP 21 include explicit adaptation targets is just one amongst the many examples of the policy relevance of this strategy. The centrality of adaptation to policy decision making is further strengthened considering that a large majority of planned adaptation actions fall within the boundaries of standard public sector planning and management practices. However, mainstreaming climate change and adaptation into the policy decision process encounters many barriers. Adaptation actions take place across evolving scales and contexts under large uncertainties making evolutionary planning, monitoring and learning at the same time important and very challenging to achieve. Adaptation, cross cutting by nature, imposes a difficult synthesis and potential tension across different policy domains, administrative and responsibility levels. Similarly, it has also to reconcile legitimate differences in social actors view about how adaptation resources are distributed and the values that adaptation seeks to protect.

This session gathers a high level panel of policy experts and scientist from major international institutions working at the interface between adaptation science, policy design and implementation, to highlight the peculiar challenges and opportunities adaptation poses and to exchange experiences, best practices, findings on innovative solutions to increase the factual support from the science to the policy making community and make adaptation not only more effective but also politically and institutionally viable.

Working language: English

Agenda
“Climate-resilient infrastructure: getting the policies right”
Dr. Michael Mullan, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
Recent OECD’s studies estimates that USD 6.3 trillion of new infrastructure investment is needed globally every year to sustain growth. Decisions made about the location and design of these investments will affect communities’ vulnerability to the effects of climate change. Getting things right at the outset will be cheaper and less disruptive than being forced into subsequent costly retrofitting. This requires a coordinated policy response to ensure that infrastructure owners and developers have the incentive and capacity to integrate resilience. The presentation will address the main areas for actions to improve and make effective this coordination, discuss successful examples in this direction highlighting how they addressed the pervasive presence of uncertainty and identify main areas for future work on sustainable infrastructure policy

“Climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in Europe – Enhancing coherence of the knowledge base, policies and practices”
Dr. Sergio Castellari, European Environment Agency
One of the areas in which climate change adaptation overlaps and interacts more with the policy management and planning and intersects with existing legislation, at different levels is disaster risk reduction. This requires a constant process for enhancing policy coherence and improving the knowledge base to support policies and practices. The presentation assesses current practices and level of know-how, and highlights emerging innovative tools national, regional and local authorities are using to tackle the impacts of weather- and climate-related hazards.

“The use of economics in climate adaptation policy, appraisal and financing”
Dr. Paul Watkiss, Paul Watkiss Associated
International Finance Institutions and Development Banks /Partners have made ambitious pledges to scale-up adaptation finance spending, in both Europe and in LDCs. These pledges total $billions of new investment and programming by 2020.  At the same time, countries are developing national adaptation plans, as well as investment pipelines and projects, to access this finance. However, there are major gaps between investment demand and the supply of projects, which arise from the challenges in adaptation programming and especially economic appraisal. This talk will discuss these challenges and report on lessons from successful (and unsuccessful) case studies.  It also identifies a number of areas where further development of applied adaptation economics is needed, highlighting opportunities for useful exchange between policy-makers and academics.

SPEAKERS:
Prof. Francesco Bosello (Chair), Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy University of Milan and Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change
Francesco Bosello is associated professor of economics at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Milan and affiliate scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) where he coordinates the Economic Analysis of Impact and Policy division. His main research interests are focused on the economic and modelling assessment of climate-change impacts and policy. In 20 years of research activity he developed and applied climate-environment-economic integrated assessment models to the study of optimal mitigation and adaptation strategies, their costs, benefits,  integration, trade off and complementarities. His other research interests are more broadly related to the economics of the environment and of sustainability.

Dr. Michael Mullan, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
Michael Mullan leads the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) work on climate change adaptation. This encompasses analysis of adaptation policies in OECD countries, integrating adaptation into development assistance and cross-cutting economic issues. Prior to this he was an Economic Advisor in the UK Government, responsible for national adaptation policy. He has also worked on a variety of areas related to climate change including: an independent review of finance for reducing emissions from deforestation, mitigation cost curves and agri-environment policy. Michael studied at the University of Oxford and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Dr. Sergio Castellari, European Environment Agency
Sergio Castellari holds a degree in Physics (University of Bologna, Italy) and a Ph.D. in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography (University of Miami, Florida, USA). Since April 2015 he works as Seconded National Expert (SNE) at the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen (Denmark) on impacts, vulnerability, adaptation to climate change and disaster risk reduction and contributed to the Climate-ADAPT platform. He is senior scientist at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Bologna (Italy). He has been affiliated at Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) from 2006 until March 2015, where he has been also the Head of the “Institutional Relations and Adaptation Policies” Unit. In the last decade he has been working as a climate science and policy expert for the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea. He participated as Italian Delegate to IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), UNFCCC, (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), UNCCD (UN Convention to Combat Desertification), GEO (Group on Earth Observations) and UNEP (UN Environment Programme) sessions. From August 2006 to March 2015 he has been the National Focal Point for Italy of IPCC.

Dr. Paul Watkiss, Paul Watkiss Associated
Paul Watkiss has over 20 years’ experience of climate adaptation policy, planning and project appraisal support, working for DFID, World Bank, KfW, ADB and EIB, as well as national governments in Europe and Africa.  Paul has led national adaptation planning assessments and developed the economic and financial appraisal for major projects: he has been involved in the development of climate adaptation proposals totalling > $250 million, including for the green climate fund.  Paul also has led the development of frameworks for identifying and appraising early adaptation projects, including decision making under uncertainty. He was a contributor the IPCC 5th Assessment Report (including the chapter on the Economics of Adaptation) and has published widely on adaptation policy and decision making.