Coastal Resilience to Climate Change: Integrating Biodiversity, Adaptation, and Sustainable Landscapes in West Africa
Funding Approach: Single Funded with Co-benefits. Geographic Approach: Co-located. Sectors Integrated: Biodiversity and Climate Change.
This story focuses on how WA BiCC uses biodiversity, adaptation, and sustainable landscapes funding to achieve cross-sectoral objectives. WA BiCC works to protect, manage, and restore mangroves, which support fish nurseries and maintain marine ecosystems. Mangroves also provide a natural barrier that mitigates storm surge and reduces coastal community vulnerability to climate change. Further, the high carbon content of mangrove systems makes them a strategic resource to protect from deforestation and degradation to reduce GHG emissions. WA BiCC also builds government capacity to generate and use climate information in coastal planning to support the integration of coastal resilience into National Adaptation Planning processes, share information on coastal adaptation strategies, and raise awareness on cross-sectoral contributions to adaptation.
Lessons Learned
Leverage climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) to encourage collaboration across government agencies and facilitate cross-sectoral discussions.
Employ a CCVA process to inform actions to reduce community vulnerability to climate change. Establish a multi-sectoral CCVA team with representatives from government, non-governmental organizations, and academia, including fisheries officials, protected area authorities, coastal management authorities, and other stakeholders. Use the CCVAs as a way for government agencies, who do not typically collaborate outside of their legislative mandates and do not always share information easily, to engage with each other. Promote cross-sectoral engagement to ensure the CCVA process considers environmental protection, food production, water security, climate risk prevention, and natural resource management. Leverage the CCVA findings to identify integrated approaches to address transboundary threats to these areas.
Present CCVA findings and recommendations to local beneficiaries; WA BiCC organized options analysis workshops that ensured stakeholder buy-in and active participation. Use the CCVA and subsequent workshops as a framework around which institutions and stakeholders can converge to identify and act upon common goals to address climate vulnerability and consider different ecosystem-based approaches, including mangrove management and restoration, integrated coastal zone management, and nature-based infrastructure for disaster risk reduction.
Be explicit about expected or targeted outcomes for various funding streams, as funding objectives will vary even if the paths to those objectives might converge.
Use detailed theories of change for each activity component and explicitly show the different objectives of each funding earmark in those theories of change. Clearly illustrating objectives will allow staff to see how activities and results lead to multiple outcomes, including mangrove restoration and protection, reduced vulnerability of human populations to climate change, and reduced GHG emissions.
Be strategic about where to integrate.
Consider integrating some, but not all, activity components; although WA BiCC is an integrated activity, its combating wildlife trafficking component focuses on improving information sharing and enforcement and is not integrated with other activity components. In contrast, WA BiCC’s climate resilience, sustainable landscapes, and other biodiversity activities, such as efforts to address biodiversity loss, are closely intertwined.
Consider co-funding as an opportunity to promote adaptive management and achieve benefits across sectors.
Recognize that integration of funding streams can make a project more nimble in responding to cross-sectoral challenges. Communicate development outcomes based on what resonates best with each local community; for instance, even if one of WA BiCC’s objectives is to reduce illegal mangrove deforestation to promote mangrove protection for fish nurseries (a biodiversity objective), staff recognized it might be more effective to present mangrove protection as a means to reduce storm surge (a climate vulnerability objective). Tailor community engagement to the issues most important to each community; such targeted engagement can help achieve benefits across biodiversity, adaptation, and sustainable landscapes funding streams.
Learn More
Explore more case studies on the USAID Biodiversity Integration Case Competition website.
Learn more about biodiversity integration with other USAID technical sectors on the Biodiversity Conservation Gateway.
For more information about USAID/West Africa’s work on biodiversity and climate change, please visit USAID’s project page.
Contact
Victor Mombu, Environmental Policy Advisor, USAID/West Africa
