Using climate financing wisely to address multiple crises

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Opportunities in food, land and water systems: Generating multiple benefits and reduce crisis risk
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest Assessment Report has identified several key adaptation categories for the most representative climate risks [16].A global review of science and evidence from the ground, the IPCC categories include practices from agriculture, land and water management, livelihoods support and food systems strengthening.Here we group the IPCC categories according to the main action areas needed to transform food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis: de-risking, rerouting, and realigning [17] (Table 1).This allows us to better understand how alignment of practices and links to climate finance can contribute to building resilience.
De-risking actions focus on securing resilient livelihoods and value chains through early warning systems and adaptive safety nets.Rerouting actions stimulate climate-resilient sustainable practices.Realigning actions focus on improving policies and finance.The examples presented for each of these three action areas, show how existing investment in food, land and water systems can generate higher returns.However, several enabling factors also must be considered as they contribute to more coherent and effective programming for these action areas.These are timeframes and planning horizons, the targeting of investments, and the partnerships and institutional arrangements that need to be in place.

Timeframes: From short-term response to multi-year programming
Aligning timeframes for planning and implementation across relevant programs and institutions, particularly at national and local levels, is possibly the lowest hanging fruit in the coherence agenda, with a significant multiplier effect.Most importantly, aligned or at least compatible planning horizons are a prerequisite for climate finance to become accessible and useful to humanitarian actors.Whereas humanitarian response within acute crises understandably operates on shorter time horizons than climate adaptation or social protection programming, in the areas of peacebuilding and displacement response and prevention, this does not have to be the case.The challenge lies in tying together the currently divergent mandates, and consequently the time frames of planning and implementation across these domains.For example, frontloading coherent and conflict-sensitive humanitarian and development investments pre-crises (anticipatory action) can improve inclusion of relevant stakeholders when the institutional infrastructure is mobilized in response to a disaster or conflict.During crises, climate-sensitive investment in food, land, and water systems can contribute not just to meeting basic needs, but also to transforming livelihoods and strengthening social cohesion.Examples include, for pre-crisis, forecast-based mechanisms, with allocation of financial resources and interventions agreed in advance for the implementation of early actions [89].Anticipatory action in the form of cash transfers ahead of forecast flooding in Bangladesh (see Table 1 [23]) is an example of how punctual, short-term yet timely interventions-sometimes delivered by humanitarian agencies-can have mid-to long-term benefits in increased resilience.Post-conflict, environmentally sustainable agricultural practices have the potential to promote social cohesion.For example, fostering such practices among cocoa producers in Colombia and Co ˆte d'Ivoire can provide a valuable contribution to post-conflict peacebuilding, constituting an example of aligning timeframes for climate change adaptation and crisis prevention [90].
The most critical factor in aligning efforts is the connection and sequencing of funding timelines.In international cooperation, the current country development frameworks negotiated between host governments and UN country teams, for example, offer a potential platform for aligning timelines in support of multi-year development strategies-from planning to implementation to monitoring.Several international humanitarian agencies have shifted from reactive programming to multi-year country and regional proactive strategic planning.For example, the World Food Programme has begun to develop 5-year Country Strategic Planning Frameworks that are supposed to be accompanied by longer-term and coherent yet flexible budgets that allow for emergency programming to be delivered in a timely manner but also in pursuit of the long-term objectives [91].
Table 1.Examples of adaptation in food, land, and water systems contributing to i) peace building and increased human security, ii) reduced displacement and stronger host community resilience and iii) poverty reduction and food security, reducing crises risk and harnessing multiple benefits.

Type of adaptation categories according to IPCC AR6
Examples of adaptation in food, land, and water systems for. . .

Peace building and human security
Reducing displacement risk and building host community resilience Poverty reduction and food security DE-RISK FOOD, LAND and WATER SYSTEMS: Transfer and manage risk.

Early-warning systems
Early warning about droughts, floods, pests, food, and fertilizer prices.
Early-warning, early-action (EWEA) systems provide alerts of potential food crises, variables included are climate, conflict, food availability, among others.While there is still much improvement needed, EWEA systems, promote early action to decrease harm, suffering, grievances, and conflicts [18].Forecastbased finance schemes, for example, support decision-making and trigger access to humanitarian funding early [19].
Seasonal and extreme events early warning systems that support seasonal migration or short-term evacuation respectively, reduce the risk of longterm displacement in Bangladesh [20,21] and Philippines [22].
Anticipatory cash transfers to households forecasted to experience extreme flooding in Bangladesh led to significantly improved child and adult food consumption and improved wellbeing even 3 months after intervention, as well as significantly reduced asset loss and costly borrowing in times of drought [23].Famine and drought early-warning systems have helped avoid starvation among the world's most vulnerable people [24].and refugees [26].

Insurance
Commercial disaster insurance schemes such as micro-insurance can act as a social protection instrument to respond to climate shocks, especially when the premiums are subsidized and/or the main target group for the schemes are small farmers [27].In Kenya, households with index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) coverage made more productivity-increasing investments, reduced distress sales of livestock during droughts, and increased their income [28].

Food production, storage, and distribution
Improve and increase local food production, availability, access, and distribution.Shortened supply chains, improved food storage, local food production and chains.
Adapting food systems in a climate crisis is crucial for peace and security; climate change and variability can impact food security and food insecurity can exacerbate the drivers of insecurities [13,29].Moreover, conflict and climate events significantly disrupt food systems and value chains.
Increasing the resilience of value chains vis-a-vis climate and conflict shocks can stabilize food security and therefore contribute to sustaining peace [30].
The connection between food insecurity and displacement is clearly documented and there are examples of both humanitarian action and development investment that can reduce the risk of displacement by investing in food systems [31,32].Food insecurity has also been shown to be both, a cause and a consequence of conflict and displacement, and solutions include significant investments into local food production and distribution systems [33].
A study analyzing the impacts of large, one-time cash transfers and farm management plans among farmers in Senegal, show that crop production and livestock ownership were higher in the transfer group relative to the group that only received visits [34].In Malawi and Zambia, there is evidence that the receipt of a cash transfer is able to generate investments that can influence household productive capacity [35].

Diversification of livelihoods
Diversifying income-generating and livelihood activities within the food systems sector and beyond.Diversification of crops, off-farm employment, seasonal migration, etc.
Diversification of livelihoods can increase and stabilize incomes and reduce poverty e.g., in Zimbabwe [36]; in El Salvador and Honduras [37]; and in the Brazilian Amazon [38], reducing competition over scarce resources and potential conflicts [39].It can also reduce the opportunity cost of joining armed groups, especially for children and youth [40].
Using diversification of livelihoods and seasonal strategies to avoid the need to move, e.g., from drought-affected regions.For example, destocking and combining livestock rearing with agricultural activities by pastoralist communities in Ethiopia to reduce drought displacement [41].Seasonal migration can be an effective adaptation option for farmers beyond the usual lean season, when climate variability and extremes result in crop failure e.g., in Niger or Northern Ghana [42].
Social assistance combined with economic inclusion and livelihoods approaches (such as livelihoods diversification, financial services, training and skills development, etc.)can contribute to adaptation behaviors such as climate-smart agriculture, or planned relocation and migration [27].

REROUTE LAND SYSTEMS
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Type of adaptation categories according to IPCC AR6
Examples of adaptation in food, land, and water systems for. . .

Farm practice
Changing crop variety or timing, close productivity gaps, irrigation schemes, integrated crop/livestock systems, relocating livestock linked to improved pasture management.
Adapting farming systems and practices in combination with managing and transferring risk can mitigate insecurity and grievances and contribute to peace in the Sahel [43].
Improved irrigation systems in the MENA region as a contribution to mitigate the impacts of water scarcity on displacement risk or introduction of conservation agriculture practices to build resilience of farming communities otherwise compelled to migrate [44].
A global study shows that households that made 10 adaptive changes, were food secure for an additional 47 days yearly [45].[48].

Restoration and creation
Significant correlations between climate change impacts, ecosystem losses and migration found in the Marshall Islands with people using mobility as an adaptation strategy [49].Migration in the face of ecosystem decline can enhance resilience, as opposed to resettlement, which tends to undermine people's agency [50].In addition to ecological ecosystems, "cultural ecosystem services", such as social relations, cultural heritage and education, or identity and sense of place, can ease resettlement of displaced persons and increases overall wellbeing, including mental health [51].
Social protection can facilitate measures that build "ecological resilience" to slow onset events, for instance through public works approaches that combine cash transfers with measures that help reduce environmental degradation [27].A social protection scheme in Ethiopia increased tree cover by 3.8% between 2005 and 2019, with larger increases in less densely populated areas and on steep-sloped terrain [52].Brazil's Bolsa Floresta programme supports lowincome households with a monthly payment if they commit to zero deforestation and enroll their children in school [53].

REROUTE WATER SYSTEMS
Water use and demand management; supply and distribution; capture and storage.
Precision/drip irrigation, managed aquifer recharge, cooperative policies across multiple sectors, constructing irrigation infrastructure, inter-basin transfers, water reuse, farm ponds and revival of water bodies, multi-purpose water reservoirs and dams.
In Nepal, an EU-UNEP project using a community-led process to improve water infrastructure and management that reduced incentives for conflict over water and improved capacities to cope with increasing weather extremes [54].
In Mali, the Community Violence Reduction project helped to defuse conflicts by building a locally managed solar powered well to better serve people and livestock [55].
Example of Lebanon water stress and water management in refugee contexts show that Interventions to rehabilitate the water networks can reduce water stress to lower levels than pre-conflict [56].Urban water supply can be a means to facilitate access to water for displaced populations in cities [57].
Wastewater reuse for food production in refugee camps and host communities in East Africa has shown to boost incomes, food and human security in resource constrained communities which may otherwise experience resource conflict [58] In small island states, such as those in the Caribbean, models of integrated water resource management provide examples for maintaining ecosystem services while improving economic welfare [59].Sharing water resources across sub-sectors and users is especially complex in situations of scarcity.Cross-sector wastewater reuse and wastewater-freshwater swaps can complement coping strategies, improve economic water productivity, and promote resilience [60].

Coastal accommodation, costal hard protection, and costal retreat.
Raising of dwellings, improved drainage, seawalls, dykes, revetments, groynes or tidal barriers, land reclamation, retreating from coastal areas relocation and resettlement.
Mainstreaming of human security into adaptation planning and implementation in the Mekong Delta has been shown to require more attention from both research and policy perspectives, as adaptation can generate unexpected human security risks and may potentially lead to conflicts when these risks are not addressed [61].
Advance responses, such as the creation of artificial land above the sea, allowing people to remain in place and avoiding or deferring resettlement and managed retreat [62].Migration and planned relocation as adaptation to avoid disaster displacement in small island states [63], Philippines [64], and West Africa [65].Using traditional knowledge in fishing communities for adaptation in the Pacific, allowing atrisk communities to stay in place [66].
Promoting migrant-friendly, climateresilient secondary cities in Bangladesh, as managed retreat and to avoid displacement [67].
Successful coastal embankments can help people avoid poverty traps in Bangladesh by reducing exposure to flood events [68].Migration supported by social protection systems can be sustainable for poor populations [69].A combination of asset transfers along with complementary interventions like building plinths through the Chars Livelihoods Programme in Bangladesh improved food security in flood-prone areas [70].

REALIGN FOOD, LAND, and WATER SYSTEMS
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Planning and targeting: Moving towards conflict-sensitive areabased approaches and universal access to services
Aiming for the mutual benefits that climate action and investing in connecting social protection, solutions to displacement, disaster risk reduction, and peacebuilding may bring has implications for processes of planning and targeting.Currently, land rehabilitation or food security often target particularly vulnerable communities rather than take an area-based approach, which may be more appropriate in the context of larger climate financing programs.
In the context of social protection, including consideration of climate change may require expanding the coverage of regular social protection schemes that provide basic welfare and seek to address chronic poverty and livelihood challenges for groups considered most at risk of climate shocks.As previously shown, managing the poverty impacts of climate change may not mean new social protection policies need to be put in place, but rather that existing ones need to be ramped up or refined [53].For this, new approaches to targeting will have to be A policy coherence analysis for the climate security nexus in Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe shows that while policy documents from across all the sectors show evidence of understanding to some extent the conditions and circumstances that may heighten the chances of climate-related security risks emerging, translating this awareness into concrete policy measures remain a persistent challenge [71,72].An analysis of the Green Climate Fund shows that there is huge potential of embracing climate conflict sensitive programming to achieve multiple peace and climate adaptation benefits [73].
Out of the 166 nationally determined contributions (NDC) submissions to the UNFCCC before COP27, 55 per cent explicitly recognize human settlements as a priority area for adaptation, including the need to respond to human mobility needs and forced displacement [74].In addition to the recognition of migration and displacement in more than half of the NDCs submitted.It is important to note that the Paris Agreement has formally included references to migration and displacement [74] and the Global Compact on Migration explicitly acknowledges the impacts of climate change on migration patterns and proposes climate change adaptation and risk reduction to reduce adverse drivers of displacement [75].
Despite their potential as a policy response to climate change, the integration of social protection policies and schemes within the climate policy agenda is currently limited [27].Social protection policies rarely integrate climate change challenges strategically while climate policies seldom recognize the potential of social protection in climate change adaptation or mitigation [76,77].

Governance
Transboundary fishing agreements, collective water management, indigenous water-sharing systems, enforcing the land rights of indigenous populations, international compact on migration, policies for adaptive governance.
Participatory land use planning can increase the level of social cohesion and reduce conflicts.In the Philippines, the International Alert has developed the Resource Use and Management Planning (RUMP) which uses geospatial intelligence and inclusive processes to design land use maps in more than 400000 hectares in conflict affected zones in Mindanao, Bataan, and Palawan [78].Land expropriation and lack of land rights have caused the insurgence and increase of grievances by indigenous groups, especially in Africa [79].Providing and systematizing land rights can help reduce these grievances and contribute to sustaining peace [80].
Several agreements govern human mobility at global and regional levels, including migration and displacement related to climate extremes and climate change.In principle, these include provisions for protection and support to people on the move as well as aim to build resilience and reduce forced movements in the future, and support regional stability and prosperity.They include the Global Compact for Migration [81] and regional free movement agreements, such as the IGAD protocol for the Horn of Africa [82], the AU free movement of persons protocol [83] the Great Lakes Protocol [84], and the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility (under development).
Social protection is an important element of citizenship and the social contract and can support important societal issues such as equal pay for women [85,86].A study in Tanzania shows how cash transfer programs contribute to trust in government and civil society [87] (Evans et al., 2019).
Research in Pakistan reveals that cash transfers promote trust in government and support for government and the political system (e.g., over extremist groups that position themselves against the state)-with the largest effects when feelings of relative deprivation and poverty are [88] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000355.t001 found, however, to buffer both idiosyncratic shocks that affect only individual households as well as covariate shocks that have an impact on whole communities.In the context of climate change where whole areas are affected by negative impacts of environmental shocks or disasters rather than just specific population groups, targeting for social protection may need to take a different form, moving towards area-based approaches and including more explicit resilience objectives in its food security and land management activities [92].For example, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in India has the potential to contribute to climate change adaptation by moving from predefined target groups and works outputs to participatory priority setting involving the whole community [93].In addition, such public works schemes can increase climate resilience by investing in construction in risk-prone areas and in physical adaptation measures.In Ethiopia, social protection schemes were coupled with reforestation goals, increasing tree cover by almost 4 per cent over a 15-year period (see Table 1).
In the context of displacement, similarly, long-term resilience building of displaced communities often already requires approaches that include the host communities.The need for a more inclusive universal approach that goes beyond specific targeting will be particularly relevant in climate change affected regions where more communal land use and water management, resource allocation, and livelihoods diversification are critical components of durable solutions [94].For example, inclusive, area-based approaches to planning for relocation in the face of sea level rise risk in the Pacific can ensure sustainable climate adaptation and long-term resilience building of at-risk communities through consultation and negotiation [95].
In fragile and post-conflict contexts, climate adaptation actions that ensure an equitable distribution of adaption benefits can contribute to ongoing peacebuilding efforts (see Table 1 [46,47,96,97]).More coherent targeting of investment may be required, however, through conflict-sensitive National Adaptation Plans and by developing climate adaption and peacebuilding interventions within climate vulnerable areas and communities [98].To promote coherence at national and local level, donors have an important role to play, in that they can not only increase their support for conflict-sensitive and more flexible adaptation funding but can also tweak common targeting criteria in social protection and livelihoods programmes.Making targeting requirements more flexible overall, allowing for a move from targeting certain socioeconomic and demographic groups to targeting broader communities and locations at risk from climate change, and including a broader range of eligibility criteria that are relevant to climate security, can create new conditions for climate-smart and conflict sensitive programmes across development outcomes.
Finally, current approaches to both climate change adaptation on the one hand, and investments in poverty reduction, social protection, solutions to displacement, and peacebuilding on the other, often have a limited understanding of intersectional inequalities and how they relate to climate risks [99][100][101].Programmes are often created in ways that are blind to the different ways in which climate change impacts are mediated by gender, sex as well as age, disability, ethnicity, caste, and other characteristics; this limits effective targeting that could produce climate adaptation benefits as well as various development outcomes and stability.Therefore, for certain areas, such as social protection or solutions to displacement, programme design may need to go beyond aiming for resilience at the household level and instead think of resilience at the individual level, considering specific challenges as well as capacities [99].For example, designing social protection to better support women's climate resilience entails both supporting women's ability to respond to climate change and reducing root causes of their disproportionate vulnerability such as differences in resource control, livelihoods, and empowerment.Gender-related considerations for social protection program design can include assessing the feasibility of targeting women as the main recipients of intervention, providing complementary programming that may be particularly relevant to women's needs such as training on climate-smart practices, considering time burdens and safety of program activities, framing activities to households and communities in view of local norms such that women are able to fully participate, and ensuring women's preferences are incorporated in the design and delivery of programming.

Institutional arrangements and partnerships: Coordinated national planning and jointly implemented local action
For mutual benefits to emerge more strongly from climate action on the one hand, and efforts to reduce poverty, displacement, and conflict on the other, organizational alignment is necessary within different types of institutional arrangements: from policies to budget planning, from working groups and programme coordination to funding streams, from national coordination mechanisms to international partnerships.While there are some exceptions, coordination between different development and humanitarian sectors, climate action, and peace and security programmes often are ad-hoc and lack a common vision.Such a vision at national as well as regional levels, underpinned by adequate financing, is the foundation for the types of institutional arrangements that will be required in the future.
Negotiating climate finance, including support for national adaptation to climate change, has become a matter of strategic importance to countries.As a result, the development of national adaptation plans (NAPs) and updating National Determined Contributions (NDCs) today are usually under the leadership of senior figures within a government.While specifically dedicated positions and departments can create siloes, the central position of climate action planning in many countries carries the possibility of enhanced coordination and cooperation across line ministries and sectors.Where such alignment is happening at the national level, in principle this could be more easily recreated at provincial and district levels, with more coordinated planning of budgets down to the community level.Further, even though integrating climate solutions in national-level strategies is crucial, it is equally important to involve representatives from local and sub-national levels in this integration process.Participatory land-use planning as for example done in Mindanao, Philippines (see Table 1 [78]), can contribute to the triple outcomes of strengthened social cohesion, increased climate resilience and reduced conflict risk.Such inclusive approaches provide a solid foundation for implementing actions that are tailored to local contexts and have the requisite support for effective implementation [102].
Importantly, international actors such as humanitarian agencies or development cooperation and research partners can tap into existing national visions and coordination mechanisms as well as actively support and strengthen them.There are examples of social protection programmes that have adopted such a national vision that includes climate risks, such as India combining social protection and water conservation through the MGNREGA programme or Ethiopia using its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) [27].However, coordination across relevant but distinct and sometimes institutionally distant sectors is inherently difficult as different political agendas, technical languages, and administrative processes need to be accommodated.In addition, international humanitarian and development actors must learn to engage with a new set of and in support of more effective engagement, this may need to review their own institutional set-up and processes.
Working at the triple nexus of humanitarian response, development investment, and peacebuilding, means renewing the focus on truly collaborative partnerships between local institutions from both government and civil society.As most conflict arises from local grievances and insecurities, escalating to national or regional levels, linking community-based response, climate action, and peacebuilding may be most effective in creating the transformative processes required for lasting change.Importantly, financing will have to reach local levels more directly and predictably, and with longer timeframes than currently allowed for under humanitarian budgets.

Conclusions
A convergence of several risk drivers creates the compound crises we see across the globe today.At the same time, the global humanitarian community and national institutions in affected countries are increasingly resource constrained.In this context, existing financing mechanisms should be evaluated for their potential to create synergies between social protection, peace, and inclusion objectives on the one hand and climate resilience outcomes on the other.Climate finance has an established political framework and financing mechanisms, which can, in principle, address multiple risk drivers.Real-world examples, creating multiple benefits across development goals, crises prevention and climate action, as presented here, already exist.For these mutual benefits to emerge, however, and for climate finance to contribute more significantly to crises prevention, the currently disparate policy and program timeframes, planning horizons, targeting practices, and institutional set-ups need to be become better aligned.While there is growing recognition of this requirement, coherence between the ministries and departments responsible for the different policy areas is still a challenge and partnerships between the providers of currently separate services rare.By incentivizing increased alignment through its climate and development financing architecture instruments, however, national governments and the international donor community can accelerate progress and increase the economic and social return on its investment.