Rising to the Challenge: Success Stories and Strategies for Achieving Climate Adaptation and Resilience

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Policy Responses

Africa’s Pulse calls for several policy actions to foster stronger and more equitable growth. These include restoring macro-economic stability, promoting inter-generational mobility, supporting market access, and ensuring that fiscal policies do not overburden the poor.

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Governments should adhere to monetary and fiscal best practices such as central bank independence, fiscal rules, fiscal councils. They should implement measures to enhance transparency in budget planning and procurement, and build their technical capacity around debt management and transparency.

African countries should invest in nutrition to reduce stunting in early childhood, for example through school feeding programs, and expand foundational learning and teacher training during basic schooling. They should focus on broadening access to services for under-served populations and regions.

Governments should remove distortions that keep firms from growing and result in the misallocation of people’s skills. They should improve the delivery of justice, so that the rules are better applied and more predictable. And they should proactively engage with the private sector to encourage market access by implementing regional trade agreements such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and investing in transport corridors.

Because taxes and poorly targeted subsidies can have an outsized impact on the poor, reforms should focus on more effective and efficient utilities by reforming energy subsidies and water tariffs, so they support access to better services without penalizing the poorest households. Governments can grow their revenues by eliminating VAT exemptions and implementing stricter oversight of new tax expenditures, coordinate and harmonize regional taxes, and focus domestic revenue mobilization on high-net-worth individuals through income and property taxes.

Key Messages

- About 1.2 billion people are at high risk from climate-related hazards, but much can be done to make people, business, communities, and countries more resilient. 

 

- A combination of more rapid development, more resilient development, and targeted adaptation interventions can reduce climate and disaster impacts. 

 

- Development plays a key role as nobody can be resilient without access to basic infrastructure and social services, decent housing, or while living in poverty. While a 10-percent increase in income is associated with a decrease in the population at high risk by close to 100 million people, current development patterns will not be enough. 

 

- An assessment of 44 countries shows that, in spite of growing attention and adaptation planning, most countries are still lagging in implementing resilience interventions, especially those related to policies and macro-fiscal dimensions, and in the monitoring and evaluation of their actions. 

 

- However, the report dispels the idea that no progress is being done. With a collection of 30 examples from the private sector and 9 public-sector reforms or interventions, including public-private partnerships, it shows that promising adaptation and resilience efforts are undertaken globally and have measurable results. These initiatives and good practices can be replicated to scale up action and to build resilience for all.

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