An investigation of the evidence of benefits from climate compatible development

Climate change is likely to have profound effects on developing countries both through the climate impacts experienced, but also through the policies, programmes and projects adopted to address climate change. Climate change mitigation (actions taken to reduce the extent of climate change), adaptation (actions taken to ameliorate the impacts), and on-going development are all critical to reduce current and future losses associated with climate change, and to harness gains. In the context of limited resources to invest in climate change, policies, programmes, or projects that deliver ‘triple wins’ (i.e. generating climate adaptation, mitigation and development benefits) – also known as climate compatible development – are increasingly discussed by bilateral and multilateral donors. Yet there remains an absence of empirical evidence of the benefits and costs of triple win policies. The purpose of this paper is therefore to assess evidence of ‘triple wins’ on the ground, and the feasibility of triple wins that do not generate negative impacts. We describe the theoretical linkages that exist between adaptation, mitigation and development, as well as the trade-offs and synergies that might exist between them. Using four developing country studies, we make a simple assessment of the extent of climate compatible development policy in practice through the lens of ‘no-regrets’, ‘low regrets’ and ‘with regrets’ decision making. The lack of evidence of either policy or practice of triple wins significantly limits the capacity of donors to identify, monitor or evaluate ‘triple wins at this point in time. We recommend a more strategic assessment of the distributional and financial implications of 'triple wins' policies

Twenty years of change in benthic communities across the Belizean Barrier Reef

Disease, storms, ocean warming, and pollution have caused the mass mortality of reef-building corals across the Caribbean over the last four decades. Subsequently, stony corals have been replaced by macroalgae, bacterial mats, and invertebrates including soft corals and sponges, causing changes to the functioning of Caribbean reef ecosystems. Here we describe changes in the absolute cover of benthic reef taxa, including corals, gorgonians, sponges, and algae, at 15 fore-reef sites (12–15m depth) across the Belizean Barrier Reef (BBR) from 1997 to 2016. We also tested whether Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), in which fishing was prohibited but likely still occurred, mitigated these changes. Additionally, we determined whether ocean-temperature anomalies (measured via satellite) or local human impacts (estimated using the Human Influence Index, HII) were related to changes in benthic community structure. We observed a reduction in the cover of reef-building corals, including the long-lived, massive corals Orbicella spp. (from 13 to 2%), and an increase in fleshy and corticated macroalgae across most sites. These and other changes to the benthic communities were unaffected by local protection. The covers of hard-coral taxa, including Acropora spp., Montastraea cavernosa, Orbicella spp., and Porites spp., were negatively related to the frequency of ocean-temperature anomalies. Only gorgonian cover was related, negatively, to our metric of the magnitude of local impacts (HII). Our results suggest that benthic communities along the BBR have experienced disturbances that are beyond the capacity of the current management structure to mitigate. We recommend that managers devote greater resources and capacity to enforcing and expanding existing marine protected areas and to mitigating local stressors, and most importantly, that government, industry, and the public act immediately to reduce global carbon emissions

Integrated planning that safeguards ecosystems and balances multiple objectives in coastal Belize

A growing number of nations aim to design coastal plans to reduce conflicts in space and safeguard ecosystems that provide important benefits to people and economies. Critics of coastal and ocean planning point to a complicated process with many actors, objectives, and uncertain outcomes. This paper explores one such decision-making process in Belize, which combines ecosystem service modeling, stakeholder participation, and spatial planning to design the country’s first integrated coastal zone management plan, officially approved by the government in August 2016. We assessed risk to three coastal-marine habitats posed by eight human uses and quantified current and future delivery of three ecosystem services: protection from storms, catch and revenue from lobster fishing, and tourism expenditures to identify a preferred zoning scheme. We found that a highly adaptive team of planners, scientists, and analysts can overcome common planning obstacles, including a dearth of data describing the health of the coastal zone and the many uses it supports, complicated legal and political landscapes, and limited in-country technical capacity. Our work in Belize serves as an example for how to use science about the ways in which nature benefits people to effectively and transparently inform coastal and ocean planning decisions around the world.EDITED BY Joao Rodrigue

Watershed interventions priority areas and ecosystem services from enhancing societal and ecological benefits through land-sea planning at multiple scales in the Mesoamerican region

Deforestation impacts the benefits coral reefs provide to coastal communities in multiple ways. Yet, connections between terrestrial and marine ecosystems are generally assessed at a single scale and from an ecological perspective alone. This limits understanding of how watershed management affects coastal systems and how benefits are accrued by communities at different scales. We explore how ecological and societal benefits of watershed interventions (restoration, protection, and sustainable agriculture) differ when considered regionally versus nationally in the Mesoamerican Reef region. We employ linked land-sea ecosystem service models to prioritize the three interventions at the two scales. With a regional approach, interventions can be prioritized in larger transboundary watersheds, resulting in overall more sediment retention and greater increase in healthier corals for neighboring nations. The national approach prioritizes non-transboundary, often smaller, watersheds, trading increases in coral health in neighboring nations for more societal benefits for each nation individually, especially decreased coastal risk and increased nature-based tourism. Our findings highlight the effect of scale on societal and ecological outcomes across and within nations. Planning at both scales can provide a win-win approach for the region by improving the health of forests and corals while increasing societal benefits.</p