Outlook on climate change adaptation in the Tropical Andes mountains

Are the responses forward-looking?

The Andean countries ideally ought to address both climatic variability – such as seasonal and year-to- year variability, and both slow and fast onset events of climate change. With regards to climate change, fast onsets of climate change encompassing extreme events and most disasters events find themselves more on the government radar than slow onset events, because of their short-term nature. Slow onset events, such as longer droughts or the loss of soil moisture, do not impact in a short time frame and are therefore more difficult to grasp. Moreover, these impacts may occur over a longer time frame than the political cycles; thus, actions to address climate change may not render political benefits in the short term or contribute to re-election. Health policies exemplify the dynamics of the temporal perspective and the need for a long-term perspective. For example, Colombian health care policies are forward-looking because they are focused on the impacts of disasters on health (short term), while assessing the interactions between changing climate and vector-borne diseases (midterm) and expanding the coverage of the health system to include diseases related to climate change (long term) (McMichael et al., 2006). In general, the lack of performance indicators in policies makes it impossible to assess their efficiency and effectiveness. Nonetheless, some adaptation policies in the analysed Andean countries have set adaptation goals and targets, showing some rather slow progress. The national and sectoral policies that have been analysed in this report do not specifically include

adaptation measures on mountains. Moreover, existing policies do not fully integrate flexible approaches such as resilience and adaptive systems, which would increase the countries’ capacity for responding to climate change. However, climate variability and socioeconomic impacts are acknowledged through responses to extreme weather events. The governments’ disaster risk management offices usually lead these responses, though they are implemented with the sectors mainly through special programmes due to the emergent nature of the event.

Policies vary between countries and also between sectors (within a country), though some patterns are worth mentioning. IWRM is a fairly common approach in the countries of our study and can be seen as forward-looking because it aims to integrate different water uses by considering the water flows needed by the ecosystem (for a critical perspective on IWRM see Boelens, 2008). Although IWRM may not specifically address mountains, these ecosystems are considered crucial for the functioning of and service provision in the

Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of Colombia

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