climate adaptation workshop — Manila, Philippines

In September, Theuns and Pretesh attended the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Sustainable Transport Forum in Manila.

Attending the forum helped facilitate a number of meetings with key ADB personnel, including senior members of the Climate Change, Transport, and Education departments, and also the Alternative Executive Director, Mario di Maio who oversees activities in the Pacific.

Theuns and Pretesh introduced the Climate Adaptation Platform in each meeting and ADB received it well.

Along with making key connections, these meetings allowed Theuns and Pretesh to get a better understanding of how ADB operates and how to best position the Platforms offering with them going forward.

Climate Adaptation Workshop in Manila

In addition to the main forum, Theuns also led a two-hour Climate Adaptation Workshop at the Oakwood Premier Hotel on the evening of the 12th of September.

This private workshop was attended by more than 20 ADB staff members and various country delegates.

As with the Build Resilience 2016 Workshop, the main focus was on discussing the most important climate adaptation issues that need to be addressed.

To help achieve this, the workshop participants participated in a group questionnaire exercise to get to the bottom of the core issues. Some of the issues and questions that the workshop participants identified were:

A need for better design of low-cost housing
More resilient system of small harbours and ports, especially in the Pacific
Training people to take practical measures from climate science
How do we position the need for climate adaptation to attract more significant levels of private investment?
There is a need to develop tools to provide a more rapid assessment of needs.
Need more publicized case studies, data, and information based on factual evidence
Do we need a better understanding of how effective solutions are? These solutions need to be measurable and quantifiable
What is the best practice for climate-proofing?
What are the pure adaptation projects, and how do we pitch those to countries?
We need a tighter definition of climate adaptation.