By Ricci Symons and Ilaria Firmian
This year’s Development and Climate (D&C) days were held at the periphery of
the UNFCCC COP23 during its middle weekend. IFAD went beyond its traditional
co-sponsoring role and partnered with ODI, MRFCJ, BSR, RCCC, CSAYN to organise a number of
parallel sessions.
At
D&C Days the dynamic format encourages
dialogue on a range of issues that link policy, knowledge and practice.
Innovative approaches encourage participants to interact, challenge existing
thinking and to generate new ideas.
This year D&C days had four overarching themes that linked different
sessions together:
1) Resilience through empowerment
and access: exploring effective pathways to address poverty and climate
vulnerability and manage climate risk, and to consider how engagement in
decision making, equitable access to resources, and the provision of goods,
services and innovation can be enhanced.
2)
Valuing lived experience, and local knowledge: highlighting the
importance of creating space and the voice of those at the development and
climate frontline in all discussions related to climate and development.
3)
Transparency and downward accountability: examining the ways in
which decisions are made, climate responses are prioritised and climate finance
is directed.
4) Shared resilience: recognising we live in an
interconnected world with complex intercontinental supply chains, global
financial flows, and decision making shared between the international, national
and local levels, strategies for managing risk and building resilience must be
designed and implemented together.
IFAD also
gave its contribution into discussions related to mobilising private sector
investments for climate resilience. Everyone felt that the private sector has
never been so high in a COP agenda as it is this year. Public investment is clearly
not enough - and this is even more true for the agriculture sector - leveraging
private investment is a real need.
The
importance of tapping into local knowledge and listening to local voices was
another area to which IFAD brought relevant experience and a local partners’
perspective.
“We have to be
a part of a transparent inclusive discussion without blaming each other” has
been repeated many times during this year’s D&C Days. Which is fully in
line with the Fijian presidency pro-activity in bringing in all stakeholders,
including business, local governments and grassroots representatives.
At the end
of the second day, there was a strong sense that by moving adaptation forward
on the ground by providing guidance to implementation we could all provide
inputs to the Talanoa Dialogue. The first step in that direction
will be a short outcome document from D&C Days with high level messages to
inform the dialogue.
To get a
sense of the richness of the discussion have a look at summaries of day 1: https://storify.com/IIED/development-climate-days-day-on and day 2 : https://storify.com/IIED/development-climate-days-day-two