Co-benefits
There is an ongoing debate regarding the relationship between adaptation
projects and broader development projects. While it is undeniable that
development projects may have positive effects also for adaptation and
adaptive capacity, they may also cause negative impacts for adaptation.
It is also difficult to distinguish between what a project strictly
contributes to increased adaptive capacity and to development more in
general. Often adaptation projects driven by development organizations
have spill- over effects on development paths by determining who gets
access to what or by contributing to the improvement of resources
availability and reducing losses caused by extreme events and weak
infrastructure, therefore contributing also to sustainable development.
The World Bank (2010) has called for ‘win-win-win’ solutions which are
robust under a range of future climate scenarios and which create
environmental benefits while simultaneously contributing to development,
adaptation and mitigation. Some projects, like reforestation and biogas
plants installations, may work as a mitigation measure by, for instance,
improving carbon sinks and therefore playing an important role in
voluntary carbon markets. Such projects, however, have also the
potential to contribute to adaptation (i.e. reforestation may prevent
future landslides) and to sustainable development (i.e. the reduction in
wood burning decreases incidences of smoke-borne diseases and reduces
wood fire consumption). These synergies are called co-benefits and with
regards to the evaluation of adaptation projects they present the
challenge of how to account for all the possible benefits and to
evaluate how effectively projects achieve them. In some instances the
co-benefits of climate actions are not clear and immediate, and there
may be trade-offs or co-costs, which drive up the cost base of the
climate project, to be taken into account. From an economic perspective,
co-benefits are outcomes of climate change actions that increase the
flow of total benefits and hence the benefit/cost ratio of these
actions. In climate change projects aimed at mitigation the calculation
of possible co-benefits is easier, since reduction in CO2 emissions
resulting for instance from a solar thermal generation project can be
traded in carbon markets as additional reductions and become part of the
project benefits. Co-benefits of adaptation projects are more complex to
evaluate economically because the co-benefits deriving or example from
making roads more resilient are more ‘diffused’ and may involve
different metrics (i.e. reduced vehicle maintenance or reduced threat of
isolation to local communities associated with higher quality of roads).