2nd Consultation Report. Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World. Governance for Sustainability

COVID-19 has once again brought the role of governments, and their ability to cooperate and coordinate their actions into the spotlight. It has however also highlighted significant gaps in various areas including the science policy interface; the ability of institutional mechanisms to deal with crises; in the preparedness of global and national science communities and government systems; and in access to reliable, verifiable data to inform decision making. The consultative meetings around this topic draw on lessons learned and experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to identify effective policy tools and mechanisms that would also give due credence to issues of poverty alleviation, justice, inequalities, and the environment. The goal is to suggest pathways for more robustand responsive governance systems for an uncertain future. This report gives a summary over the discussions in the second consultative meeting that took place online, on July 27, 2020

Perspectives on transformational change in climate risk management and adaptation

In the context of strong evidence on mounting climate-related risks and impacts across the globe, the need for 'transformational change' in climate risk management and adaptation responses has been brought forward as an important element to achieve the Paris ambitions. In the past decade, the concept has experienced increasing popularity in policy debates and academic discussions but has seen heterogenous applications and little practical insight. The paper aims to identify relevant perspectives on transformative approaches and transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation to propose an actionable definition for practical application. Using a systematic search and review approach, we review different perspectives across policy and scientific publications, focusing on work published in the past decade and identify common features of what transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation may involve. We show that different perspectives on transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation persist, but certain areas of convergence are discernible. This includes understanding transformational change as part of a spectrum that begins with incremental change; involves climate risk management and adaptation measures focusing on deep-rooted, system-level change and tends to aim at enabling more just and sustainable futures; often oriented towards the long-term, in anticipation of future climate-related developments. In addition, we identify an 'operationalisation gap' in terms of translating transformational change ambitions into concrete transformative measures that can be replicated in practice

Finance for Loss and Damage: a comprehensive risk analytical approach

The climate policy discourse on Loss and Damage has been considering options for averting, minimizing and addressing critical and increasingly systemic climate-related risks in vulnerable countries. Research has started to identify possible finance sources and mechanisms, but stopped short of positioning those options along a comprehensive risk management framework in line with the whole scope of Loss&Damage. BuildingTaking a risk analytical perspective, we present a comprehensive Loss and Damage finance taxonomy and framework made up of three pillars: finance for transformational risk management to reduce risks and adapt to climate change, risk finance to provide insurance and other risk transfer for residual risks in vulnerable countries as well as curative finance for potential unavoidable loss of ecosystems and livelihoods. We apply this taxonomy and sets of finance options to recently identified limit-prone sectors and regions that are projected to experience soft and hard limits as a consequence of slow-onset climate-related phenomena

Transforming resilience-building today for sustainable futures tomorrow

Addressing increasingly profound vulnerabilities and risks requires a step change away from piecemeal fixes often focused around preparedness and post-disaster recovery towards transformational interventions and measures that focus on creating systemic shifts that challenge underlying vulnerabilities and governance gaps from the design phase itself. IIASA and ISET in the project “Transformation and Resilience” conducted with the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance and other initiatives respond to the evident need to reform climate and disaster risk management towards transformational approaches. In this working paper, we reviewed efforts to respond to this evident need, drawing on key findings from the forthcoming book “Transformation and Disaster Resilience” (Springer, forthcoming) to provide a practical stock-take of what transformational risk management (adaptation) is, deep dive into examples of transformational interventions and uncover barriers and enablers for getting transformational resilience-building underway in diverse contexts. We found that while there are diverse entry points for transformational resilience-building, they share a combination of (some of) the following interlinked pathways: i) Operationalizing innovative approaches and solutions; ii) Delivering integrated intervention packages; iii) Establishing participatory governance models; and iv) Scaling successful pilots, along with a strong commitment to delivering on achieving transformation by setting it as their goal from the start, consequently designing their resilience-building measures and interventions with transformation as their guiding star. We also found that whether interventions and measures designed for transformational change will deliver on their objective strongly hinges on creating appropriate enabling environments, which include i) learning and knowledge platforms and experiential niche learning and continuous feedback loops; ii) aligning transformational change objectives with strategic government priorities to harness and foster political will and moment; as well as iii) unlocking the transformational potential of bottom-up governance grounded in local contexts; together with iv) establishing the necessary framework conditions for phased, long-term programs; and v) committing sufficient financial outlays to initiatives designed with transformational change in mind

Report on First Consultative Science Platform. Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World. Governance for Sustainability

COVID-19 has once again brought the role of governments, and their ability to cooperate and coordinate their actions into the spotlight. It has however also highlighted significant gaps in various areas including the science policy interface; the ability of institutional mechanisms to deal with crises; in the preparedness of global and national science communities and government systems; and in access to reliable, verifiable data to inform decision making. The consultative meetings around this topic draw on lessons learned and experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to identify effective policy tools and mechanisms that would also give due credence to issues of poverty alleviation, justice, inequalities, and the environment. The goal is to suggest pathways for more robustand responsive governance systems for an uncertain future. This report gives a summary over the discussions in the first consultative meeting that took place online, on June 10, 2020

3rd Consultation Report. Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World. Governance for Sustainability

COVID-19 has once again brought the role of governments, and their ability to cooperate and coordinate their actions into the spotlight. It has however also highlighted significant gaps in various areas including the science-policy interface; the ability of institutional mechanisms to deal with crises; in the preparedness of global and national science communities and government systems; and in access to reliable, verifiable data to inform decision making. The consultative meetings around this topic draw on lessons learned and experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to identify effective policy tools and mechanisms that would also give due credence to issues of poverty alleviation, justice, inequalities, and the environment. The goal is to suggest pathways for more robust and responsive governance systems for an uncertain future. This report gives a summary over the discussions in the third consultative meeting that took place online, on September 1, 2020. Building on overall approach and the 1st and 2nd consultations, the IIASA-ISC team engaged with the experts to identify a set of policy options at global and national systems governance levels. The first consultation focused on drawing lessons from how COVID-19 has been governed at different levels of governance, the second consultation focused on identifying options and opportunities for enhancing governance in support of realizing sustainability objectives. The third consultation further narrowed in on the options and opportunities suggested and harvested policy perspectives with a view to identifying their feasibility and steps needed for successfully translating recommendations and options into to action

Transformative adaptation through nature-based solutions: a comparative case study analysis in China, Italy, and Germany

This paper explores how claims for transformative adaptation toward more equitable and sustainable societies can be assessed. We build on a theoretical framework describing transformative adaptation as it manifests across four core elements of the public-sector adaptation lifecycle: vision, planning, institutional frameworks, and interventions. For each element, we identify characteristics that can help track adaptation as transformative. Our purpose is to identify how governance systems can constrain or support transformative choices and thus enable targeted interventions. We demonstrate and test the usefulness of the framework with reference to three government-led adaptation projects of nature-based solutions (NBS): river restoration (Germany), forest conservation (China), and landslide risk reduction (Italy). Building on a desktop study and open-ended interviews, our analysis adds evidence to the view that transformation is not an abrupt system change, but a dynamic complex process that evolves over time. While each of the NBS cases fails to fulfill all the transformation characteristics, there are important transformative elements in their visions, planning, and interventions. There is a deficit, however, in the transformation of institutional frameworks. The cases show institutional commonalities in multi-scale and cross-sectoral (polycentric) collaboration as well as innovative processes for inclusive stakeholder engagement; yet, these arrangements are ad hoc, short-term, dependent on local champions, and lacking the permanency needed for upscaling. For the public sector, this result highlights the potential for establishing cross-competing priorities among agencies, cross-sectoral formal mechanisms, new dedicated institutions, and programmatic and regulatory mainstreaming

Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World. Governance for Sustainability

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is generating massive adverse socio-economic impacts for societies around the globe and brings many issues of relevance for ongoing sustainability transformations into the spotlight. One such issue is the role of governance for sustainability, for which COVID-19 provides encouraging as well as challenging lessons. In this background note, we draw first, tentative lessons on how COVID-19 management has been governed across levels of governance, focusing on identifying opportunities for enhancing governance for sustainability including for tackling climate change

Boosting systemic risk governance: Perspectives and insights from understanding national systems approaches for dealing with disaster and climate risk. Contributing Paper.

This contributing paper reviews the governance of systemic risk with the aim to identify opportunities and enabling factors for improving governance by managing what are increasingly interdependent risks with the potential for cascading impacts. The researchers use insights from the joint International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis-International Science Council (IIASA-ISC) “Building pathways to sustainability in a post-COVID world” initiative and forensic reviews of disasters, the Post-Event Review Capability (PERC), to illustrate how sub-national and national systems have governed systemic risks. More specifically, we explore risk governance successes and failures with the goal of developing insights on how to bolster systemic risk governance in policy and practice. The study indicates that the governance of systemic risks tends is still siloed in spite of the clear need for cross-sectoral and multi-level initiatives. The examples provided from the PERCs and the IIASA-ISC initiative illustrate how single-focus risk governance limits opportunities for building resilience and effectively addressing the systemic nature of risks. They also highlight clear opportunities for shifting towards more systemic risk governance, one where risk is co-managed across institutional boundaries and risk reduction methods are founded on effective and inclusive communication