Screening Resources: Climate Information Resources

Climate information is crucial to understanding possible short- and long-term risks. The resources below can help to identify key climate and disaster risks to the project location. 

• The screening tools rely largely on the World Bank  Climate Change Knowledge Portal (CCKP) which provides historical and future climate and climate-related datasets.  The CCKP data draw on global, quality-controlled data sets and are continually updated as new data becomes available. In some cases, the CCKP is supplemented with other sources of information. 

• The CCKP’s Climate Risk Country Profiles synthesize and distill data sets for the purposes of the screening tool. 

• ThinkHazard!, is a web-based tool enabling non-specialists to consider the impacts of disasters on new development projects. Users can quickly and robustly assess the level of river flood, earthquake, drought, cyclone, coastal flood, tsunami, volcano, and landslide hazard within their project area to assist with project planning and design. 

• The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) Disaster Risk Country Profiles include information on key socioeconomic sectors that can be used to understand sector risk. 

• The Building Resilience Index by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) provides the building sector a web-based hazard mapping and resilience assessment framework.

• National Meteorological Agencies are specialized agencies for meteorology (weather and climate), operational hydrology and related geophysical sciences.

• Climate Watch, hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), is a leading climate data repository, with information on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, country policies, and mitigation and adaptation commitments. 

• Climate Impact Explorer, by Climate Analytics is a web-based tool, covering information on a broad range of climate impacts in all continents and countries down to the province level.

National/Policy 

Resources to help identify a country’s main development goals and priority sectors: 

• Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Registry is a portal managed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) which holds countries' commitments to climate action under the Paris Agreement.

• The National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) provide a process for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to identify priority activities that respond to their urgent and immediate needs to adapt to climate change – those for which further delay would increase vulnerability and/or costs at a later stage.

• Climate Change Laws of the World: a website covering national-level climate change legislation and policies in 164 countries.

• National Communications are country-specific reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that often contain information and research on a country’s key sectors that may face risks from climate. 

• The World Bank Group’s Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) are new core diagnostic reports that integrate climate change and development considerations. 

• World Bank Country Partnership Frameworks (CPF’s) provide systematic, evidence-based, country-driven models, focused on the Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and increasing shared prosperity in a sustainable manner.

• National indicators from World Bank Open Data may also be useful for this tool.

• The World Bank Country Pages provide access to a number of helpful resources, including country briefs, country statistics, feature stories, and country portfolio information. 

Cross-Cutting/Cross Sectoral

• The Resilience Rating System: A Methodology for Building and Tracking Resilience to Climate Change, by the World Bank provides guidance and specific criteria to assess the resilience of a project/operation, to better inform stakeholders on the resilience of projects and investments, create incentives for more widespread climate adaptation, and identify best practices. 

• Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity, by the World Bank lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure.

• Groundswell (Part 1): Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, by the World Bank provides a global picture of the potential scale of internal climate migration across six regions, allowing for a better understanding of how slow-onset climate change impacts, population dynamics, and development contexts shape mobility trends.

• Groundswell (Part 2): Acting on Internal Climate Migration, by the World Bank is the sequel to the Groundswell report – includes projections and analysis of internal climate migration for three new regions: East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

• The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels.

Agriculture 

• World Bank’s Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change in Agriculture and Natural Resources Management Projects – Note 3 presents guidance on assessing climate risk in agriculture and natural resources management projects. 

• Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Call to Action by the World Bank makes the case for climate-smart agriculture and provides case studies of countries implementing these practices.

• Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Profiles: seven country profiles (Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Grenada, Mexico and Peru) were developed by a joint World Bank-CIAT-CATIE team with regional LAC funds. Each country profile provides a detailed national context and spells out the key facts on agriculture and climate change.

• The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. 

• The Handbook of Current and Next Generation Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment Tools, by the European Commission-funded BASIC project, identify models that can be used for impact and vulnerability assessments in the agriculture, forestry, and natural ecosystems sectors, and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. 
   

Energy 

• Good Practice Note for Energy Sector Adaptation, This World Bank practice note aims to assist World Bank task teams in incorporating climate adaptation and resilience into power sector projects for client countries.

• Stronger Power: Improving Power Sector Resilience to Natural Hazards. This report investigates the vulnerability of the power system to natural hazards and climate change and provides recommendations to increase its resilience.

• The World Bank’s Climate Impacts on Energy Systems: Key Issues for Energy Sector Adaptation provides an overview of how the energy sector might be impacted by climate change and what options exist to address these impacts.

• Asian Development Bank’s Climate Risk and Adaptation in the Electric Power Sector discusses the exposure and vulnerability of the energy sector to climate change. It identifies adaptation options available to each source of energy generation as well as for the distribution and end use of electrical energy.

• The Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) Hands-on Energy Adaptation Toolkit helps to identify adaptation options to reduce overall vulnerability, including use of a high-level cost benefit analysis of key physical adaptation options.

• Powering through the Storm: Climate Resilience for Energy Systems: This Live Wire considers the implications of climate resilience in the power sector and highlights ongoing World Bank work and best practice, with a focus on Africa.

Finance

• The World Bank Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development report charts out the Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development (GRID) approach, which departs from previous development strategies by promoting economic growth that goes hand in hand with environmental goals and social inclusion. 

• The Climate Finance Impact Tool, created by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), is designed to screen for risks in the early stages of project development. It is designed for offline use in under two hours.

• The UK Climate Impacts Programme Business Areas Climate Assessment Tool (BACLIAT) is a workshop-based process designed to help users consider the potential impacts of future climate change on business areas.

Health  

• The World Bank’s Reducing Climate-Sensitive Disease Risks assesses known interventions to reduce risk. The report also looks at ways to help practitioners reduce the risks of key climate-sensitive infectious diseases by strengthening risk management systems for disease outbreaks.

• The Health Dimension of Climate Change by the World Bank focuses on the health impacts of climate change that are relevant for ECA countries, assessing the vulnerability of health sectors to these impacts, and providing insights into building health-specific adaptive capacity. 

• Geographic Hotspots for World Bank Action on Climate Change and Health: Investing in Climate Change and Health Series, by the World Bank identifies the projected worsening of health impacts due to climate change, and analyzes coping mechanisms to ensure health considerations are central to any and all climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.

• Frontline: Preparing Healthcare Systems for Shocks from Disasters to Pandemics, by the World Bank presents principles to better prepare health systems to respond to a wide range of shocks, from seasonal demand surges, to pandemics, climate change, and disasters.

• Climate Effects on Health Factsheets by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) give a snapshot of how climate hazards can impact health as well as prevention and management measures. Issues covered include extreme precipitation and drought, warmer water and flooding, air quality, extreme heat, and vector-borne diseases.

• The World Health Organization’s report, Protecting Health from Climate Change: Connecting Science, Policy and People, presents an overview of the links between climate change and human health and outlines priority actions to reduce vulnerability.

• The Atlas of Health and Climate by the World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization, provides scientific information on the connections between weather and climate and major health challenges, including infections, emergencies arising from extreme weather events, environmental degradation, and demographic aging.

• The Health and Climate Change Toolkit for Project Managers by the World Health Organization is a one-stop resource containing key resources that address climate change and health issues. 

• Mainstreaming Gender in Health Adaptation to Climate Change Programmes, by the World Health Organization, is a guide on mainstreaming gender throughout all phases of health adaptation programs.

ICT 

• USAID’s Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Infrastructure: Preparing for Change is a series of fact sheets on climate change impacts on various infrastructure systems, including transportation, solid waste management, ICT, and buildings. The fact sheets also suggest potential adaptation measures for each type of infrastructure.

Industry

• Chapter 10: Key Economic Sectors and Services of Working Group II’s contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report discusses climate change impacts and adaptation options for key economic sectors and services, including transport, industry (manufacturing and construction and housing), forestry and logging, fisheries and aquaculture, mining and quarrying, and financial services.

• International Council on Mining and Metals’ Adapting to a Changing Climate: Implications for the Mining and Metals Industry examines the risk posed by climate change to mining operations and installations. It also investigates available options for the mining and metals industry to adapt to climate change impacts.

Natural Resources 

• Convention for Biodiversity’s Report of the Second Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Biodiversity and Climate Change explores how the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity can be integrated into climate change mitigation and adaptation activities.

• World Resources Institute’s Reefs at Risk: Revisited provides information on the impacts of climate change on coral reefs.

• Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Risk and Adaptation (CEDRA) assessment helps assess likely climate impacts on communities and projects; prioritize these impacts; identify adaptation strategies; and develop an action plan for projects and communities to adapt.

• A Catalogue of Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Resilience, by the World Bank is a guidance document to support the growing demand for Nature Based Solutions (NBS) by enabling an initial identification of potential investments in nature-based solutions.

• Climate Resilience Tool for Plantation Forestry and USDA, discusses the challenges of climate change in natural resource management, and explores how adapting resource management to changing conditions is critical to reduce the vulnerability of key natural and human systems to negative climate change effects, and ensuring continued functionality of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the future.

• The Role of Green Infrastructure Solutions in Urban Flood Risk Management, by the World Bank and GFDRR details the role and importance of green infrastructure solutions in urban flood risk management.

Social Development 

• Environmental Change and Human Mobility: Reducing Vulnerability & Increasing Resilience is a policy brief by the KNOWMAD Thematic Working Group on Environmental Change and Migration summarizes major findings and policy implications of papers commissioned to examine vulnerability and resilience, with particular focus on developing countries.

• The Shock Waves: Scalable Social Protection for Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation, Policy Note by the World Bank details options for governments to design responsive social protection programs and mechanisms to ensure that liquidity constraints do not prevent the quick delivery of post disaster support to the population.

• Managing Climate Risks Through Social Protection: Reducing Rural Poverty and Building Resilient Agricultural Livelihoods, by the FAO and Red Crescent Climate Centre highlights the contribution of social protection to climate risk management, and disaster risk reduction through climate change adaptation and mitigation.

• The Integrating Social Protection and Climate Change Adaptation: A Review study measures social protection’s role in facilitating climate adaptation in lower income countries, and assesses current thinking on the integrated adaptation and social protection agenda.

Transportation 

• From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing: Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters, by the World Bank summarizes the risks faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change and provides recommendations for building more resilient transport networks.

• The World Bank’s Addressing Climate Change in Transport (Vol. 2) : Volume 2 : Pathway to Resilient Transport aims to set out a vision and strategy for climate-smart transport, in order to minimize the carbon footprint of the sector while ensuring its resilience against future risks.

• Enhancing the climate resilience of Africa’s Infrastructure: The Roads and Bridges Sector by the World Bank is a study helps planners determine the most cost-effective and appropriate adaptation pathway under a variety of climate scenarios.

• To Pave or Not to Pave: Developing a Framework for Systematic Decision-Making in the Choice of Paving Technologies for Rural Roads, by the World Bank presents a introduces a new multicriteria analysis that affects the paving decision in a systematic and holistic way, while maintaining economic justification.

• Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure: Gulf Coast Study, Phase I. This study explores how climate will affect transportation, and Table 1.1 identifies a comprehensive list of climate impacts on transportation identified through a literature review.

• Chapter 10: Key Economic Sectors and Services of Working Group II’s contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report discusses climate change impacts and adaptation options for key economic sectors and services, including transport, industry (manufacturing and construction and housing), forestry and logging, fisheries and aquaculture, mining and quarrying, and financial services.\

• USAID’s Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Infrastructure: Preparing for Change is a series of fact sheets on climate change impacts on various infrastructure systems, including transportation, solid waste management, ICT, and buildings. The fact sheets also suggest potential adaptation measures for each type of infrastructure.

• The Use of Climate Information in Vulnerability Assessments by the U.S. FHWA provides recommendations on how to use historical and projected climate information as transportation planners consider their climate-related risks.
   

Water 

• The Water Rapid Screening Assessment Framework, by the World Bank, is meant to provide a consistent, credible, and repeatable process for project managers to use to assess climate risks in such a way that effort expended remains proportional to the climate sensitivity of each project. Phases 1 through 3 (climate screening, climate risk assessment, and climate risk reporting) provide elements of risk assessment, while Phase 4 shifts to risk management (Climate Risk Management Plan). Each phase specifies a product demonstrating that climate risks have met assessment according to an approved procedure. In each analytical phase, either the process ends because the climate risks have proved adequately addressed or the process proceeds to the next phase to address remaining concerns.

• Water and Climate Change: Understanding the Risks and Making Climate-Smart Investment Decisions, by the World Bank, illustrates how climate change will affect hydrology and the resulting stress on and vulnerability of the water systems. The climate change dimension is also placed within the context of the impact of other stressors outside the water sector. The analysis is intended to inform the World Bank water sector investments on climate issues and climate-smart adaptation options.

• Mainstreaming Water Resources Management in Urban Projects: Taking an Integrated Urban Water Management Approach, by the World Bank, is a guidance note for cities in developing countries for managing the urban water cycle in a sustainable manner by using an Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) approach.

• Climate Change and Urban Water Utilities: Challenges & Opportunities, by the World Bank, aims to help improve understanding of climate change on the provision of water and wastewater services by urban utilities; establish an analytical framework to identify and prioritize potential climate change adaptation measures; and assess the feasibility of implementing adaptation measures.

• The IPCC Technical Paper on Climate Change and Water provides an in-depth analysis of observed and projected changes in climate as they relate to water.

• The IPCC Technical Paper Linking Climate Change and Water Resources: impacts and responses https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/technical-papers/ccw/chapter3.pdf ‎describes predicted impacts on the water cycle and describes predicted impacts on different sectors, including agriculture. 

• USAID Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Infrastructure: Flood Control Structure is a factsheet which summarizes climate stressors on flood infrastructure.

• Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design – The Decision Tree Framework, by the World Bank, is a framework which adopts a “bottom-up” approach to risk assessment using a thorough understanding of a project’s vulnerabilities to climate change in the context of other nonclimate uncertainties. It helps to identify projects that perform well across a wide range of potential future climate conditions, as opposed to seeking solutions that are optimal in expected conditions but fragile to conditions deviating from the expected.

• Resilient Water Infrastructure Design Brief, by the World Bank is a guide on how resilience can be built into the engineering design of their project. With a focus on the three natural hazards most likely to affect water and sanitation infrastructure (droughts, floods, and high winds from storms). It provides a six-step process to help address weather and climate related challenges that are most likely to affect an infrastructure component at some point in its operational lifetime.

• Hydropower Sector Climate Resilience Guide, is a methodology developed by the World Bank for identifying, assessing and managing climate risks to enhance the resilience of hydropower projects. It responds to the need for international industry good practice on how to incorporate climate resilience into hydropower planning, design, and operations.

• Building the Resilience of WSS Utilities to Climate Change and Other Threats: A Road Map, by the World Bank, is a road map that builds on the understanding that climate change is most often an amplifier of existing uncertainties and should not be evaluated as a stand-alone impact. The approach reveals the strengths and vulnerabilities of investment plans concisely and helps utilities invest robustly by identifying near-term, no-regret projects that can be undertaken now, while maintaining flexibility in pursuing additional actions adaptively as future conditions evolve.

• The Handbook of Current and Next Generation Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment Tools, by the European Commission-funded BASIC project, identifies models that can be used for impact and vulnerability assessments in the water resources sector, and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses.

• Hydropower and Dams (H and D): Strengthening Climate-Informed Project Design, is a learning note developed by the Water Global Practice at the World Bank, which is a 4-note-series highlighting successful examples of water operations that support climate change–related activities and provide useful lessons and recommendations for project design.
   

Urban Development 

• World Bank’s Urban Risk Assessments: Understanding Disaster and Climate Risk in Cities presents a framework for carrying out urban risk assessment that consists of three pillars, a hazard impact assessment, an institutional assessment, and a socioeconomic assessment.

• The World Bank Urban Risk Assessment is a flexible approach that project and city managers can use to identify feasible measures to assess a city’s risk. The primary level of the assessment helps cities identify hazard-prone areas and capacity for disaster preparedness and response.

• Toward a Holistic Approach to Sustainable Development: A Guide to Integrated Land-Use Initiatives, by the World Bank takes stock of lessons learned and best practices from a range of integrated land use initiatives to provide a guide for practitioners who are looking to implement this approach.

• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s How To Make Cities More Resilient: A Handbook For Local Government Leaders provides a generic framework for risk reduction and points to good practices and tools that are already being applied in different cities for that purpose.

• World Bank and GFDRR’s Building Regulation for Resilience: Managing Risks for Safer Cities outlines the benefits of strong and effective building regulatory frameworks, and provides a resource to assist good-practice building regulation to underpin risk-reduction strategies.

• The Role of Green Infrastructure Solutions in Urban Flood Risk Management, by the World Bank and GFDRR details the role and importance of green infrastructure solutions in urban flood risk management.

• Climate Change and Cities: First Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network examines mitigation and adaptation strategies for developing and developed cities, enabling readers to utilize information on both and leverage co-benefits between the two. It also provides case studies of effective and efficient practices in cities around the world.

• The Toolkit for Resilient Cities explores how the resilience of critical urban infrastructure systems might be enhanced to prepare cities more effectively for major weather-related hazards and the co-benefits that resiliency actions have (e.g. environmental performance, energy efficiency, safety and security, etc.). The research focuses on physical infrastructure relating to energy, transportation, water, and buildings.

• Chapter 8: Urban areas of Working Group II’s contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report explores climate change vulnerabilities and adaptation options in urban areas.