Energising adaptation: key considerations for coupling energy access with climate adaptation and resilience

People who rely on ‘dirty’ fuels and methods to cook their food and live without electricity are also some of the most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. Yet, energy is a crucial enabler of socioeconomic development.

Energy products and services have the potential to support climate mitigation and adaptation efforts, but the links to adaptation and resilience remain murky.

We believe that a clearer recoupling of climate adaptation and energy access efforts would allow us to align the benefits of fulfilling climate adaptation needs through energy access and create more resilient households. With care, this would enable a quicker scale up and achieve stronger outcomes for everyone.

This paper is a first step towards promoting a common understanding between the worlds of climate adaptation and resilience and energy access. It aims to encourage energy access investors to consider maladaptation in their decisions, and help climate adaptation or resilience investors better understand energy access and how to incorporate it in their projects.

We hope that by highlighting these issues, we can help steer investors towards better measuring and thinking on how energy access can enable a wider ecosystem of resilience against many climate impacts.