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The rural sector’s lack of resilience to climatic accidents seems to be one of the main reasons for the transformation of climatic accidents into environmental, economic and social disasters for local communities. Thus, the integration of activities geared towards the improvement of community resilience seems to be of utmost priority. This can be achieved by integrating prevention and risk-management tools into already existing social safety-nets within the framework of food security and poverty reduction strategies.

“Social protection initiatives are as much at risk from climate change as other development approaches. They are unlikely to succeed in reducing poverty if they do not consider both the short and long-term shocks and stresses associated with climate change. Adaptive social protection involves examining opportunities that approaches to social protection provide for adaptation, and for developing climate-resilient social protection programmes1”.

The tools to strengthen safety-nets would include the mobilisation of permanent public works projects to maintain and develop rural infrastructure and production systems. The participation of the local workforce from the most vulnerable households would ensure a complementary function for the safety-net through the generation of non-agricultural income. The carbon-binding potential of activities with such high labour intensity provides an opportunity for sustainable financing through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDG) or simply through public funds which target climate change mitigation. Here, we address the creation of jobs whose obvious function is rural, environmental and natural resource management.

This paper is part of the FAO Policy series: EASYPol-Resources for policy making (in agriculture, rural development and food security). You can find other EASYPol series' resources in the Resources section of this website, typing "EASYPol" in the free text search.