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).