The Country-Level Impacts of Climate Change (CLICC) project builds on previous efforts towards a common process and methodology for countries to report on their own climate change impacts and risks in a consistent way.
Vulnerability and impact assessments contribute evidence to shape and support action to tackle climate change at various levels. While the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change present a synthesis of climate change impacts on a regional basis, currently no international process exists for presenting similar information at the national level to aid global understanding of national impacts. This poses a challenge to international cooperation on cross-border impacts as assessments in different countries lack consistency or transparency in respect of assumptions and methods. Consequently, CLICC is facilitating a global understanding of country-level impacts to support action on climate change through the establishment of a long-term process, supported and coordinated at the international level. By doing so, CLICC is expected to offer the following benefits:
- The CLICC approach will help countries to present whatever evidence on country-level impacts they have available in a more consistent way in their National Communications to the UN Climate Change Convention, including providing greater transparency around the underlying methods, assumptions and limitations of the available information
- Climate-related studies result in large volumes of data, information and extensive reports. Notably, CLICC relies on existing information from national assessments and other research material, rather than generating new data minimizing “reporting fatigue” to support international and domestic reporting.
- By using existing information, CLICC can identify information gaps thereby helping countries understand what scientific capacity is needed to fill these gaps and enable both countries and donors to identify priorities for research and support.
CLICC conducted a pilot study of a proposed template for communicating the country impacts in Viet Nam, Ghana, Russia and the United Kingdom. Together, these countries cover a wide range of regions and geographical and socio-economic circumstances, and different levels of data availability. The objective of this study was to refine and demonstrate a technical approach for more consistent communication of climate change impacts and risks at the national level.
The results of this study were used in the development of the CLICC Technical Guidelines for harmonized presentation of country-level observed and projected climate impacts using the CLICC template.
The project is supported by UN Environment and the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and works closely with the World Adaptation Science Programme.
