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The Project

The Development and Climate Project is an initiative of 12 institutes from developing and developed countries. It explores the idea that a less polarised way of meeting the challenges of sustainable development and climate change is to build environmental and climate policy upon development priorities that are vitally important to developing countries. It focuses on the potential that contributions by developing countries to the management of the risks of climate change should be seen not as a burden of legal commitments to be avoided, but as a side-benefit of sound and internationally-supported development. And this could then lead to an alternative strategy for establishing co-operation between developing and developed nations.

Aims

The principal aim of the Development and Climate Project is to identify development paths and actions linked to positive climate outcomes. The Project is aimed at national, developmental, and environmental communities.

Objectives

• explore national development strategies and policies that both meet development priorities of individual countries and address climate change;
• identify promising policy options and projects that assist in the transition to long-term sustainable development including policies addressing climate change;
• establish a partnership between centres of excellence in developing countries and industrialised countries to promote discussions and share experiences about integrated development and greenhouse gad reducing policies
• distil the lessons and experience from international cooperation towards a global regime addressing climate change.

Scope

The Project is focused on two priority areas of the sustainable development agenda of developing countries, which in many cases centres on poverty eradication issues:

1. energy supply for development and access to electricity;
2. food security/fresh water availability and the interrelated aspects of land use and forest management.

Within this focus, the Project will also maintain a strong link between the two areas

The reason for zooming in on certain key development issues that are important for poverty eradication, is that in relation to such more specific development issues it becomes easier to agree on what sustainability means (bottom-up approach) and what the relationship with climate change is.

The project involves five developing countries and one region and takes their local development priorities as its starting point by defining specific development objectives and current trends and important plans and initiatives. Development projects that are evaluated are in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, South Africa and West Africa.

In terms of the linkage to climate change, both local climate change impacts, possible local adaptation to climate change as well as local options for a low emissions development path will be considered. Adaptation policies seem to be in particular important to a number of least developed countries and a number of specific issues facing adaptation in this context will be considered in the projects. A number of lessons will be drawn from the national studies as a basis for addressing global cooperation in addressing climate change.

More information is contained in the project summary (PDF file).

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May 19, 2003