Estimating investments in knowledge and planning activities for adaptation in developing countries: an empirical approach

ABSTRACT

Costs of adaptation in the developing world have been mostly equated to those of climate proofing infrastructure under the assumption of unconstrained knowledge and planning capacities. To correct this, we introduce a cost-scaling methodology estimating sectoral investments to enhance the knowledge and planning capacities of countries based on an empirical collection of 385 climate-related projects. We estimate that circa 9.2 billion USD are required for financing knowledge and planning activities in developing countries in 2015. The agricultural and water sectors demand the higher investments – 3.8 and 3.5 billion USD, respectively. Average investments between 2015 and 2050 are projected at 7 billion USD per year – the largest fraction of which (4 billion) in Africa. Investments in this study were found to constitute approximately 40%, 20–60% and 5–15% of previous cost estimates to climate-proof infrastructure in the agricultural, water, and coastal sectors, respectively. The effort to finance the knowledge and planning capacities in developing countries is therefore not marginal relative to the costs of adapting infrastructure. The findings underline the potential of using empirical collections of climate-related projects for adaptation cost assessments as complementary to process and economic models.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation process
• project database
• administrative units
• costs of infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Luis Filipe Carvalho da Costa is an engineer turned researcher. He graduated with a Diploma degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (Portugal) in 2006 and received his PhD from the University of Greifswald in 2013. He has led climate change adaptation studies for European research projects, the German Ministry of Environment and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GmbH). He holds strong expertise in GIS and remote sensing, as well as being an advocate for a concerted global strategy on climate adaptation. He holds more than a decade’s expertise working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Prof. Dr Juergen Peter Kropp holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Potsdam (Germany) and since 2010 a professorship for Climate Change and Sustainability at the Environmental Science and Geography department at the University of Potsdam. In 2004 he founded the Climate Change and Development research group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and has since been heavily involved in sustainability research across multiple fields such as sustainable development, city research and transformation pathways, as well as being a member of the Editorial Board of Regional Environmental Change journal.

Notes

1 http://www.pik-potsdam.de/cigrasp-2/.

2 In this paper we use the terms understanding and knowledge interchangeably. The first reflects the terminology from the framework this work boroughs inspiration from; the second refers to terminology often used in economics and development fields.

3 https://gadm.org/data.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Umweltbundesamt under grant number 371041141 (UFOPLAN).