How early action through social protection builds climate resilience: the economic case
This online event presented new economic evidence from eight countries to help governments and funders unlock climate finance for resilience.
A rickshaw rides down a flooded street in Kolkata, India (Photo: Dibakar Roy, via Unsplash)
Climate change is driving escalating economic and human losses, particularly in least developed countries and Small Island Developing States. For vulnerable countries, climate change erodes hard-won development gains, worsens food insecurity and pushes households deeper into poverty.
Early action through social protection offers one of the most effective ways to build climate resilience – protecting vulnerable households before disasters strike and reducing the cost of response.
Investment in social protection across low- and middle-income countries remains reactive, delivering support only after crisis strikes. Evidence shows that building resilience in advance is far more effective.
To address this challenge, IIED and partners developed the ASPIRE (Anticipatory Social Protection Index for Resilience) diagnostic tool, which assesses a country’s readiness to deliver early action through social protection across policies, systems, programmes and delivery mechanisms.
This online event launched a landmark economic assessment across eight countries and 24 programmes, showing that early action through social protection delivers far better returns on investment than reactive humanitarian response.
Government partners shared how ASPIRE roadmaps are shaping proposals for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), while funders and partners discussed how to scale this approach and align national action with global processes, including the forthcoming International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on climate obligations.
Speakers
- H.E. Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda
- Mathilde Bord-Laurans, deputy executive director, Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD)
- Professor Sir Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- Animesh Kumar, head, UNDRR office in Bonn
- Kunal Satyarthi, joint secretary, Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, India
- Katherine White, deputy director for international development and climate change, Scottish government
- Abdihakim Ainte, director, food security and climate change, Prime Minister's Office, Somalia
- Madeleine Diouf Sarr, head, climate change division, Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, Senegal
- Sarah Coll-Black, senior social protection specialist, social protection and jobs global practice, World Bank
- Madeleine C. Thomson, head of climate impacts and adaptation, climate and health, Wellcome Trust
- Valerie Herzog, climate change specialist, Sustainable Development & Partnerships, OPEC Fund
- Ritu Bharadwaj, director of climate resilience, finance and loss and damage, IIED/ALL ACT
Event coverage
Ahead of the event, IIED released a study showing that countries in Africa and Asia could prevent billions of dollars in damages linked to climate change by investing much smaller sums before natural disasters strike.
The new paper highlights two complementary pathways for building resilience: anticipatory direct benefit transfers and longer-term resilience-building investments, and presents the business case for these approaches – including benefit–cost ratios and return on investment – compared with existing social protection and humanitarian responses.
You can watch a recording of the entire webinar below or on IIED's YouTube channel, where there are also timestamped links to each of the speakers' contributions.
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