Outlook on Climate Change Adaptation in the South Caucasus Mountains

Policy gap analysis

All the countries of the South Caucasus made a commitment to develop separate policy documents on climate change adaptation, either internationally or nationally. Such commitments derive not only from international obligations, but also from certain vulnerability studies conducted so far in the region. One integrated national strategy on adaptation to climate change (agreed among different government agencies and stakeholders and constructed on the basis of reliable studies), may help countries to ‘gather’ and incorporate all relevant actions into one policy document; while its provisions can be further

mainstreamed in more detail into sectoral policy documents. At this stage, however, there is a still a lack of coordination of climate actions and priorities within existing policy documents. National policy papers should specifically address mountain region adaptation to climate change, especially in the context of improving ecosystem resilience. Each of the relevant sectoral policy documents should include corresponding actions regarding climate change; either concrete ones, based on existing assessments, or ones focused on finding existing gaps in climate vulnerability assessments.

However, despite progress made by the countries on mainstreaming climate change into policy documents – a number of issues persist, as presented in the previous chapters, which prevent full-scale action in this direction: • As explained in Chapter: Technology gap analysis, vulnerability assessments are still fragmented; • To include adaptation measures in policy documents government agencies should have a clear justification of their importance, as with mainstreaming climate change into policy documents, they will facilitate imposing responsibility on relevant agencies for their implementation and allocation of financial resources from national budgets. Otherwise actions will either be too general or, as in case of the INDC or Georgia’s Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMA), commitments will be made with caveats; • Low-level of awareness about the issues among government and local authorities and the general public is preventing full climate action deployment in all three countries; • Insufficient institutional memory within relevant agencies often leads to poor action planning and implementation; • And finally, a lack of knowledge of different innovative financial mechanisms, and an inability to sufficiently leverage existing financial resources without substantially increasing expenditures, also hampers the mainstreaming of climate change actions into sectoral strategies.

Rural landscape, Azerbaijan

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