New Organizations Emerge to Provide Policy and Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation

March 3, 2015 – The 21st century is creating a whole new area of expertise and a business opportunity for organizations both private and public focused on mitigating and combating climate change.  Here is a brief overview of a few of these. If you know of others please let me know and I will endeavour to write about the work they are doing in this most important field.

Climadapt

Climadapt is a Canadian-based private sector forum that was established in 2001. It operates from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Its focus is on the development of a comprehensive climate change toolkit for policy, mitigation, and adaptation.

Current membership includes Canadian and American consulting firms, Canadian and American state and provincial departments and ministries, and municipal governments. The areas of focus include:

• Coastal monitoring and community fisheries
• Flood prevention
• Watershed and wastewater management
• Infrastructure design, development and management
• Municipal land use planning
• Environmental assessments
• Oil and gas emissions tracking

These areas of study are largely devoid of adaptation expertise and thus represent unique opportunities for the companies and organizations involved to make a significant impact on the global community.

ClimaAdapt

An organization going by a similar name to the one above is also providing adaptation expertise within Indiato address climate change. Called ClimaAdapt, its ultimate goal is to provide food security for the Indian population through climate change adaptation strategies.

The primary focus at present is on two provinces, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, both most likely to be impacted first by climate change. Studies indicate that Andra Pradesh will experience more frequent extreme weather events, especially droughts. That means developing new drought-resistant crops, dry farming techniques and new methods of irrigation to combat freshwater loss. In Tamil Nadu the focus is on the Cauvery River basin, a rich agricultural region and one vulnerable to rising sea levels and flooding. Dependence on the annual monsoon and any change to its reliability would lead to acute freshwater scarcity. For these reasons this region of the country represents the frontline in testing new sustainable methods of agricultural production.

Bioforsk

This Scandinavian organization operates under the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food. Its first responsibility is to developing sustainable agricultural practices in Norway and in particular in the changing Arctic most vulnerable to climate change. But it also extends itself gfobally to work on challenges being faced by other countries. Expertise includes research on processes in terrestrial ecosystems and development of new technologies for monitoring, mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Atkins Group

This United Kingdom-founded global engineering consultancy practice with an infrastructure focus have developed expertise in adaptation planning to combat climate change. Atkins  addresses risks and vulnerabilities and helps define policy as well as implement solutions to mitigate the impact of climate change. This includes carbon management strategies covering carbon audits and low carbon design and engineering solutions. The company’s suite of tools are designed to implement low carbon footprint solutions for existing infrastructure and new project builds.

Cascadia Consulting Group

A Seattle-based company with a global climate change adaptation consulting practice, Cascadia does vulnerability assessments looking at current and future risks, and provides decision support tools to help its clients integrate climate risk, mitigation and adaptation into ongoing planning and operations. The company has helped municipalities and countries develop comprehensive climate change adaptation plans.

Some others in this burgeoning field include:

• ICF International
• The Brendle Group
• Practical Action
• Arcadis
• Global Climate Adaptation Partnership
• Bloomberg Philanthropies
• Carbon Trust

Related articles across the web

• India’s Food Security Threatened by Groundwater Depletion
• Copenhagen’s climate-change adapted neighborhood
• Nauru launches diaster framework