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Climate change is increasingly affecting vulnerable groups and resulting in dire social and economic consequences, especially for those in the Global South. Managing current and emerging climate-related risks will require increasing individual’s and communities’ resilience, including enhancing absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Policymakers are now considering the role that social protection policies and programmes can play in building climate resilience by contributing to these capacities. However, there is a limited understanding of the extent to which social protection instruments can influence these three resilience-related capacities. Lack of assessment tools or frameworks might contribute to limited evidence of social protection’s ability to increase climate resilience. In particular, there appear to be no frameworks or tools that help assess the role of social cash transfers (SCT) in building adaptive capacity. Based on a multi-staged literature review, we develop an adaptive capacity outcomes framework (ACOF) that can help assess SCT’s contribution to building adaptive capacity, and, consequently, resilience. The framework is then tested using impact evaluation and assessment reports from SCT programmes in Indonesia, Zambia, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. The exercise finds that SCTs alone have a limited contribution to adaptive capacity outcomes, but interventions that combine cash transfers with other components such as nutrition or livelihood training show positive impacts. We find that the ACOF can support assessments of SCT’s contribution towards adaptive capacity. It can help build evidence, evaluate impacts, and through further research, can facilitate learning on SCTs' role in increasing climate resilience.
Climate change is transforming the risks individuals and households face, with potentially profound socioeconomic consequences such as increased poverty, inequality, and social instability. Social protection is a policy tool that governments use to help individuals and households manage risks linked to income and livelihoods, and to achieve societal outcomes such as reducing poverty and inequality. Despite its potential as a policy response to climate change, the integration of social protection within the climate policy agenda is currently limited. While the concept of risk is key to both sectors, different understandings of the nature and scope of climate change impacts and their implications, as well as of the adequacy of social protection instruments to address them, contribute to the lack of policy and practice integration.
Our goal is to bridge this cognitive gap by highlighting the potential of social protection as a policy response to climate change. Using a comprehensive climate risk lens, we first explore how climate change drives risks that are within the realm of social protection, and their implications, including likely future trends in demand for social protection. Based on this analysis, we critically review existing arguments for what social protection can do and evidence of what it currently does to manage risks arising from climate change. From the analysis, a set of reconceptualised roles emerge for social protection to strategically contribute to climate-resilient development.
Social protection can be a key policy tool for managing the socioeconomic impacts of climate change, including poverty and inequality. Despite growing interest from policy makers and academics, a systematic effort to document and analyze the integration of climate considerations in social protection programs is lacking. This understanding is crucial for designing policies and programs that more effectively address the impacts of climate change.
Our research provides a first systematic mapping of climate considerations integration in social protection programs in low- and middle-income countries. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identify 98 climate-relevant social protection programs and gather data on over 70 variables related to their scope and climate relevance at policy, design, and implementation level. We aim to answer the question: to what extent and how are social protection programs in LMICs climate-relevant?
We find a significant number of long-standing climate-relevant social protection programs that reach large populations and involve substantial financial investments globally. At the policy and program design level, climate considerations in these programs remain relatively limited and vary based on the sector of the lead agency. At the implementation level, most programs typically focus on shock response, though our findings show they already support broader climate functions. Our results empirically substantiate assumptions about climate-relevant social protection, offer key new policy insights, and identify areas for further research. We also make the database openly available for use by researchers and practitioners.