US Agency for International Development (USAID) remains committed to address both the causes of climate change and its impact on the broader development of our partner countries.
We advance prosperity in partner countries by helping create opportunities for clean development paths. We seek to ensure that prosperity is sustainable, by minimizing the damage that unavoidable climate change can do to development investments. And we work to ensure that prosperity is resilient, maximizing partner country capacities to cope with climate impacts.
The task is not an easy one. The effects of climate change, although global, vary across the world and include everything from increased drought to more damaging floods, from melting snowpack to blazing wildfires, from increased coastal erosion to extensive species and crop losses. The opportunities vary as well: wind and solar offgrid power generation, microinsurance to protect farmers from crop losses, payments for carbon storage in well managed forests and community level disaster prevention planning.
Consideration of climate change in strategic planning, program design, and project implementation across a wide range of development sectors is essential to the success of USAID’s mission. It is the responsibility of all development professionals to consider the impact climate change will have on their efforts and to search for opportunities to promote greener, cleaner, more resilient approaches to driving development results in areas as diverse as agriculture, health, energy production, tourism, and microenterprise.
To focus the Agency’s efforts, this strategy outlines our goals and strategic objectives and provides guiding principles based on USAID’s long history of work in related areas like disaster risk reduction, natural resources management and energy sector reform. The strategy also lays out a road map for implementation, recognizing the need to develop more detailed plans for research, monitoring, training, learning and outreach that will guide Agency officers and programming in the future.
As the strategy notes, climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our generation.
USAID has a long history of programming in sectors relevant to climate change and will draw lessons learned from this history to shape efforts under this strategy. This new development strategy marks the first time climate change will play a central role throughout the entire agency’s development efforts.
The goal of USAID’s 2012_2015 Climate Change and Development Strategy is to enable countries to accelerate their transition to climate resilient low emission sustainable economic development. To accomplish this,USAID will pursue three strategic objectives (SOs):
SO 1. Accelerate the transition to low emission development through investments in clean energy and sustainable landscapes
SO 2. Increase resilience of people, places, and livelihoods through investments in adaptation; and
SO 3. Strengthen development outcomes by integrating climate change in Agency programming, learning, policy dialogues and operations
Click here to access full document
