Impact Area and Outcome

Our key impact area is climate action for community resilience to climate change, and the desired outcome is enhanced adaptive and risk management capacities of climate-vulnerable communities for safety and socio-economic security.

Context

Agriculture is the mainstay of livelihood for a large majority of the rural population in Nepal. It is also one of the sectors most impacted by climate change. Limited access to climate information, resources, knowledge, and low adaptive capacity makes the rural populations, especially women, children, poor and marginalised people highly vulnerable to climate risks, hazards, and disasters. The loss of traditional adaptation knowledge possessed by local communities is also diminishing their capacity to adapt to climate change. Climate change adaptation is a priority investment area of the government and development partners in Nepal, but despite much effort, progress has been slow and insignificant, especially in terms of generating technologies and solutions, localising policies, building capacities, and mobilising resources to support locally-led climate adaptation and risk mitigation actions. This programme will strengthen climate risk-informed project activity planning and enhance the adaptive and risk management capacities of climate-vulnerable communities. We will focus on generating and mainstreaming tools that will enable vulnerable communities to better understand and address climate risks and develop and promote locally-led adaptation actions. We will also engage in community-level adaptation and generate grassroots-level evidence to influence local, national, and international climate policies.

The programme will contribute to the national and sub-national policies and priorities, particularly the National Climate Change Policy, National Adaptation Plan, Nationally Determined Contributions, and Local Adaptation Plans of Action, and closely align with the UN climate action localization agenda related to SDG 12 and international commitments to the Conference of Parties.

Key Strategic Actions

To achieve this outcome in this strategy period, we will:

• Work towards localization of climate change adaptation and risk management policies (e.g., National Adaptation Plan, Nationally Determined Contributions, Local Disaster and Climate Resilience Plan and Local Adaptation Plan for Action);
• Build local capacity to plan for and conduct climate risk assessments for designing climate risk-based project activity planning, generating local financing for local adaptation, and customising locally adapted anticipatory actions and risk transfer schemes such as agromet advisory and insurance;
  Establish climate-resilient villages in strategic locations for demonstration and as community resource centres for capacity building, learning, and influencing; and
• Pilot and scale up climate-resilient agri-value chain enterprises that promote green economy and low carbon emissions.