FAO’s Climate Risk Toolbox highlighted at IPPN’s Knowledge Café

On January 18, FAO presented one of its latest tools developed by the Office of Climate Change Biodiversity and Environment (OCB)to support climate risk screenings, the Climate Risk Toolbox, at the Integrated Policy Practitioners' Network’s (IPPN) Knowledge Café, aUN inter-agency initiative that promotes collective learning for policy integration.

Climate risk assessments and management in agrifood systems   

The CRTB, hosted on the Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform, allows users to conduct climate risk screenings for a chosen area of interest and system of interest (crops, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, biodiversity and forestry). The screening is based on geospatial layers which incorporate specific risk drivers and their characteristics: hazard, exposure, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. 

It has become increasingly important that policies and agricultural investments account for climate-related risks well in advance to address challenges posed by climate change and extreme weather. Policies and investments need to be designed with robust evidence both on past and future climate variability, seasonality, and extremes. 

FAO’s approach to climate risk management   

The FAO Strategy on Climate Change 2022–2031 emphasizes the importance of assessing and integrating climate risks into FAO corporate systems and programming and policy making. FAO took this a step further and become one of the first UN agencies to include a climate change and disaster risk reduction standard in its new Framework for Environmental and Social Management, which it adopted in 2022.  

Lev Neretin,  OCB Environment Workstream Lead, who coordinates work on the CRTB, explained the importance of an integrated approach to climate risk management across various areas of work, including evidence-based project and policy design and implementation, environmental and social management, and the national United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks.  

CRTB applications 

Through the CRTB, FAO promotes inclusive and affordable digitalization to trigger climate change adaptation action. It does so by scaling-up knowledge sharing on climate-resilient datasets, methodologies, and tools across agrifood systems.  

The CRTB can be applied to every spatial level, from continental to country level or sub-national levels down to project level.   

Arianna Gialletti, a CRTB specialist, emphasized its many possible applications, including:  

• Simplifying and optimizing the process of climate risk screening by providing an early detection of hazards, exposure and vulnerability conditions, as well as indicators of adaptive capacity 
  
  
• Prioritizing higher-risk countries or areas within the country for the early design of policy programmes such as the UN Common Country Analyses 
  
  
• Using geospatial information to understand relationships between different geospatial layers of differing climatic, environmental, social, and economic nature 
  
  
• Supporting users to strengthen climate risk management through tailored recommendations and resilient practices from the CRTB 
  
  
• Providing detailed descriptions of past and future climate trends and extreme weather events. The automatic report resulting from the climate risk screening analysis in the CRTB allows the user to integrate context- and project-specific information into each section of the document.  

You can explore the CRTB here. The CRTB user manual is available here. 

The YouTube link to the session recording is available here. The presentations with links shared during the session are available here.