Climate-Resilient Development: A Framework for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change

Climate change is one of many challenges developing countries must recognize and respond to in planning for the future. By increasing risks to human health, welfare, and ecosystems, climate impacts can threaten primary development goals such as reducing poverty, increasing access to education, improving child health, combating disease, or managing natural resources sustainably.

This framework facilitates the systematic inclusion of climate considerations in development decision-making. The framework’s objective is to support the development process by assisting development practitioners in identifying, evaluating, selecting, implementing, and adjusting actions to reduce climate vulnerabilities and improve development outcomes. The climate-resilient development framework described here is designed to promote actions that ensure progress toward development goals by including climate stressors, both climate variability and climate change.

The framework focuses on how climate can be incorporated into existing planning and decision-making processes – also known as mainstreaming – and focuses on achieving development goals – which we call a “development-first” approach. This framework supplements and builds upon the United States Agency for International Development project cycle management framework with additional tools designed to simplify the challenge of understanding how climate impacts can affect development strategies, programs, and projects.