• Key issues
  • Disaster Risk Reduction
  • What is Disaster Risk Reduction?
  • International frameworks
  • DRR thematic areas
  • Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change
  • Monitoring and Evaluating Disaster Risk Reduction
• Children, climate change and disasters
  • Children, climate change and disasters
  • Children and climate change
  • Child-led disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation
  • Role of education and schools in disaster risk reduction
• Strenghtening Climate Resilience
  • Strenghtening Climate Resilience
  • Climate smart disaster risk management
  • Tackle changing disaster risks and uncertainties
  • Enhance adaptive capacity
  • Address poverty and vulnerability and their structural causes
• Adaptive Social Protection
  • Adaptive Social Protection
  • Social protection, DRR and climate change adaptation: making the links
  • Making social protection work for climate variability and change
  • Climate impacts on social protection systems
• Tackling poverty in a changing climate
  • Tackling poverty in a changing climate
  • Deagrarianisation
  • Urbanisation
  • Migration
  • Equity and economic growth

Key issues

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Children, climate change and disasters

Research and advocacy on children has been relatively marginalised in debates around climate change and disasters. There is a growing body of research on the impacts of disaster events and gradual climate change on children, especially on child health. Studies have shown that children are among the worst affected in the aftermath of natural disasters. With increasing number of disasters being linked to changing climatic conditions, and the escalating frequency of droughts, floods, water scarcity, malaria and vector-borne diseases, children are likely to be adversely affected both as children and in their adult lives. This key issues guide reviews these issues and recommends further reading.

Strengthening Climate Resilience

J. Silberberg / Panos Pictures

'By focusing on linkages between approaches, achieving a triple win of reducing disaster impacts, adapting to climate change and safeguarding development gains is possible' (Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, June 2010). This key issues guide interrogates the possibility through the lens and literature of disaster risk management, and asks whether a climate-smart version of disaster risk management can indeed aid climate change adaptation and protect development. In doing so, it considers what modifications of disaster risk management policy and practice are required, given that climate change is altering the frequency and magnitude of some hazards, increasing vulnerability and magnifying uncertainty.

Adaptive Social Protection

T. Smith / Panos Pictures

Given the increasingly complex and interlinked array of risks that poor and vulnerable people face, it is likely that approaches to vulnerability reduction, such social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, will not be sufficient in the long run if they continue to be applied in isolation from one another. In light of this challenge, researchers at IDS have coined the term ‘Adaptive Social Protection’ (ASP) to describe policies and programmes that combine these as a means to increase the livelihoods resilience of the poorest and most vulnerable people. This Key Issues guide explores the ASP concept, and presents a range of themes and reports exploring the links between social protection and climate variability and change in policy and practice in developing countries.

Tackling poverty in a changing climate

M. Henley / Panos Pictures

Tackling poverty in a changing climate is going to be critical if our international response to climate change is going to encourage, not constrain, development. Yet at the same time, it is a very large topic, and this Key Issues guide cannot, and does not, attempt to be a one-stop ‘how-to’ guide to ending poverty in the context of climate change. Rather, the approach we take is to consider four processes which we feel will have fundamental implications for climate change and poverty efforts, but which perhaps do not currently receive the attention they deserve. These processes are: deagrarianisation (a long-term de-linking of livelihoods in the global south from agriculture); urbanisation; migration; and equity and economic growth.