West and Central African countries are already experiencing negative climate change impacts, with severe consequences especially for their agricultural sectors and food security. Adequate response to climate risks is needed at different levels and in different forms, ranging from regional over national policy processes to local implementation. For this purpose, countries in the region have submitted updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) with adaptation components and are in the process of formulating or implementing National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). However, these NDCs and NAPs often do not provide practical or detailed guidance on how to operationalise adaptation goals, e.g. in priority sectors, or with regard to investment needs. Despite large interest, comprehensive climate risk analyses are lacking, and the evidence of adaptation effectiveness is limited, especially in data-scarce regions such as West and Central Africa. This is in part due to a lack of rigorous and high-quality impact evaluation studies of adaptation strategies, which allow a comparison between adaptation and non-adaptation. In addition, data on potential co-benefits, maladaptive side-effects and heterogeneous effects on different demographic groups, such as women or youth, is especially scarce. The PACO project will support the implementation of the NAP and NDC priorities in the partner countries and help the Climate Commission for the Sahel Region (CCRS) and the Climate Commission for the Congo Basin (CCBC) to support its member countries in building adaptation capacity. PACO will improve abilities to adapt to climate change in Bénin, Côte d'Ivoire, the Republic of Congo and Sénégal. The project will work to build capacity within governments, civil society, municipalities and small and medium enterprises and implement small scale projects addressing specific adaptation needs, with the ambition to be scalable.
PIK will provide the scientific basis and outlook for the adaptation projects selected and implemented within the framework of PACO. This includes the provision of climate and weather impact projections for the PACO partner countries, as well as climate risk assessments for the agricultural sector and where possible related sectors (water, agroforestry, land use, food security). In addition, cross-cutting themes like differential climate impacts and adaptation options by gender will be studied. Overall, the aim is to support the prioritisation of adaptation investments to cope with climate and weather risks via rigorous impact evaluations. In each of the four countries, PIK will be involved in the selection of the small-grant projects and will support a local research partner to evaluate the impact of one of the winning projects. In Benin, PIK will conduct a more thorough impact evaluation using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the effectiveness of the implemented adaptation measures, their socio-economic potential, co-benefits as well as potential maladaptation.
Duration
Nov 01, 2023 until Oct 31, 2027
Funding Agency
GIZ via BMUV
Funding Call
International Climate Initiative (IKI)
Contact
Christoph Gornott
Lisa Murken
