As a bit of a reminiscence, when I was working at the Oxford branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute, there was a member of staff who had come on secondment from JICA, the Japanese international cooperation agency, to do a masters degree in the Department of Environment at Oxford University, where I was also working. For his master's dissertation, he had developed a framework for the financial assessment of climate change. That later became Climate-FIT, the framework for assessing climate change for the JICA project. Unfortunately, the framework was not used in many of JICA projects, partly because climate change was not as significant then as it is now and partly because the methodology was too complicated. Then, by chance, I got the job of revising Climate-FIT after working as an expert on the biggest climate change project in JICA and setting up su-re.co at the time. Coincidences like this are interesting, aren't they?
My work was more on evaluating adaptation measures, and since the previous framework was very complicated, I decided to simplify it anyway this time. The reason why mitigation measures can be generalised to a certain extent is that all greenhouse gases are measured by a single measure, the carbon dioxide equivalent = "tCO2eq". For adaptation, this single measure is either impossible or very difficult. What should we base our decisions on? The US dollar? Life expectancy? Calorie intake? It's almost impossible to combine all these things into one. The previous framework also considered separate evaluation methods for each sector and another division between development projects and climate change. I have combined these separate evaluation methods for different sectors and project types into one. Not separating general projects from climate change projects is known as mainstreaming.
In creating the new framework, we also sought to understand the trends and standards of similar international review reports. These include the German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ), the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and related climate change-related organizations. The Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) are international initiatives to standardize information related to climate change (CDSB). The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, and international organisations such as ISO are developing standards for adaptation.
In the field of adaptation, the Global centre for Adaptation (GCA), established in the Netherlands, and the International Standards Organisation (ISO) are involved in the standardisation of adaptation (ISO14090: Adaptation concepts and requirements, ISO14091: Vulnerability assessment). However, just as national adaptation plans (NAPs) vary from country to country, so do the characteristics of adaptation, such as location specificity and context specificity. For this reason, the revised Climate-FIT Adaptation is based on the IPCC concept, but focuses on common aspects of the approach to climate risk assessment and adaptation, as well as the implementation approach, to allow for a degree of flexibility depending on the circumstances of the project. As a result, the Framework is more of a guidance document than a report, as was the case with the previous Framework. The actual framework will be presented at another time.
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