Action on climate change, resilience and new goals should go together

This weekend, world leaders adopted a set of 17 ambitious new global goals that will guide sustainable development in the coming 15 years.

Resilience is a key feature, prominent within the very first goal on ending extreme poverty, but also included in several other goals, such as those on hunger, cities and human settlements, and of course on climate change.

In their speeches this weekend, many world leaders acknowledged that unless we tackle climate change, progress on many of the other goals will be challenging. An Overseas Development Institute publication launched this weekend noted that catastrophic climate change could draw up to 720 million people back into extreme poverty.

The new climate change goal calls for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, and includes a specific target to “strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries”.

It also seeks to “promote mechanisms for raising capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management in least developed countries and small island developing states, including focusing on women, youth and local and marginalised communities”.

Acknowledging the relationship between the global goals and the upcoming U.N. climate negotiations in Paris, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that there is consensus that the Paris agreement “must strengthen resilience to climate impacts, with a focus on the poorest and most vulnerable”.

He also noted that the Paris agreement would be “the floor, not the ceiling, for collective ambition.’

Aby Drame of Senegal-based ENDA Energie, and a country engagement leader for Building Resilience to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED), spoke on behalf of civil society in the high-level interactive dialogue on “protecting our planet and combating climate change” chaired by President Francois Hollande of France and President Ollanta Humala of Peru.

In her statement, Drame noted that “extreme weather and disaster risks are escalating and are now recurrent. This amplifies imbalances and jeopardizes opportunities for sustainable development.”

She also highlighted the need to focus on home-grown practices to adapt to climate change while preserving ecosystems, and the need to support the adaptive capacity and resilience of communities most vulnerable to climate hazards and natural disasters.

BRACED is of course at the front line of this work, with the same focus on resilience as a key feature of development, and especially focusing on the most vulnerable groups, including women and children. We have much to offer to the many actors now eager to get to work in implementing the new Global Goals: a direct contribution through our impacts on the ground, but also the emerging lessons learned on how to achieve those impacts.

In New York, we strengthened connections with a range of other resilience initiatives, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Resilience Partnership, and a new resilience initiative prepared for the Paris climate meeting by the Ban Ki-Moon climate change team.

The formal agreement including the goals and targets is available here. Indicators to measure progress on all of the targets will be developed over the coming months.