Social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change

Many organisations work with the vulnerable groups to increase their resilience to withstand shocks, improve their ability to reduce/manage risk and to reduce their poverty, which is a risk factor in itself. Why do we consider these groups are more vulnerable:
• The poor/socially marginalised often live in places more exposed to hazard risks
• They have less ability to cope with and recover from disaster impacts
• They have less voice and influence
• They depend on informal safety nets that become stretched after major shocks
• They are adversely affected by delays in, or lack of access to, relief/early recovery responses

Social protection approaches have been successfully used to:
• Reduce disaster and climate-related impacts
• Protect from total destitution
• Enhance abilities to reduce existing disaster impact risks and adapt to new/increased risks as a result of climate change

‘Natural’ disasters are a product of the social, economic and political context in which they occur. Although hazards that lead to natural disasters cannot be prevented, their effects can be mitigated or reduced. To this end, disaster management approaches focus on reducing the risk posed by actual and potential hazards. Climate change and catastrophes have a direct impact on the health of the global population. Impacts of climate change will be overlaid onto existing vulnerabilities of both the rural and urban poor and excluded. Poor communities are not homogenous however, and it is important to understand the differentiated social impacts of climate change based on gender, age, disability, ethnicity, geographical location, livelihood, and migrant status. Some specific examples include:
Gender: Water and climate change
Men and women have distinct roles in water use and management, leading to different needs and priorities. Climate change will increase the time taken to collect water in rural areas, a task mainly done by women and girls, due to travelling greater distances to find water. In urban areas, water collection is also an issue as women and girls may spend hours queuing for intermittent water supplies.
The Elderly: Health and climate change
The elderly are likely to be particularly vulnerable especially where social protection is limited or non-existent. They are at high risk from climate-change related impacts like heat stress and malnutrition and in rural areas can face restricted access to healthcare, as they are often unable to travel long distances to the nearest health facility.
Migrants
Climate change may contribute to making targeting more complex due to an increase in seasonal migration or permanent migration, making locating beneficiaries more difficult.

Social protection has much to offer in helping the poorest reduce their exposure to current (DRR) and future (adaptation) climate shocks. In their paper Climate Change Adaptation, Disaster Risk Reduction and Social Protection, Mark Davies, Katy Oswald and Tom Mitchell highlight potential adaptation benefits of different strands of social protection:
• Protective measures provide relief from deprivation. Protective measures are narrowly targeted safety net measures in the conventional sense – they aim to provide relief from poverty and deprivation where promotional and preventive measures have failed. Protective measures include social assistance for the chronically poor, especially those who are unable to work and earn an income. This equates most closely with mainstream social welfare. Social assistance programmes typically include targeted resource transfers –disability benefit, single parent allowances and social pensions for the elderly poor – that are financed publicly (out of the tax base, with donor support and/or through NGO projects).
• Preventive measures seek to avert deprivation. Preventive measures deal directly with poverty alleviation. They include social insurance for economically vulnerable groups – people who have fallen or might fall in to poverty and may need support to help them manage livelihood shocks. This is similar to social safety nets. Social insurance programmes refer to formalised systems of pensions, health insurance, maternity benefit and unemployment benefits, often with tripartite financing by employers, employees and the state. They also include informal mechanisms, such as savings clubs and funeral societies.
• Promotive measures aim to enhance real incomes and capabilities of the poorest and most vulnerable populations while remaining grounded in SP objectives. They are achieved through a range of livelihood enhancing programmes targeted at households and individuals, such as microfinance and school feeding.  The intention of promotive measures is not to broaden the scope to include all development initiatives, but to focus on approaches and instruments that have income stabilisation at least as one objective. Strategies of risk diversification – such as crop or income diversification– can be considered promotive measures.
• Transformative measures seek to address vulnerabilities arising from social inequity and exclusion of the poorest and most marginalised groups. Interventions under this category might include collective action for workers’ rights, protecting minority ethnic groups against discrimination or HIV and AIDS sensitisation campaigns. Transformative approaches to SP are therefore broadly similar to rights-based approaches.

Two examples of initiatives:
The Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change (RVCC) project in Bangladesh has explicitly mainstreamed climate change throughout its design and implementation. One adaptation strategy identified by the programme is the need to promote alternative livelihoods. The project encouraged the uptake of assets such as duck-rearing to enhance income and achieve greater resilience in the face of climate change.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of India, beginning in February 2006 in two hundred of the poorest rural districts, guarantees 100 days of employment a year to the rural poor. Wages are fixed at the State minimum wage. These public works programmes, such as strengthening embankments and de-silting irrigation may be used as a physical response for building household and community resilience against climate change impacts. The scheme currently issues job cards on a household rather than individual basis and this may not be sufficient to support the chronically poor and may also prevent vulnerable household members from benefiting from the scheme. Employment guarantee schemes can have gender equity objectives, and target women and female headed households; however, critics have questioned the implications for women’s workloads. Where the work involves heavy manual labour, this can exclude highly vulnerable people such as the elderly and disabled.

By placing social protection in the context of the impacts of natural phenomena, particularly climate, we establish a framework for social protection measures to strengthen poor people’s resilience to disaster risks that acknowledge the changing and unpredictable nature of climate-related impacts. This concept of adaptive social protection is characterised by a number of features that include:

• An emphasis on transforming productive livelihoods as well as protecting, and adapting to changing climate conditions rather than simply reinforcing coping mechanisms.
• Grounding in an understanding of the structural root causes of poverty for particular people, permitting more effective targeting of vulnerability to multiple shocks and stresses.
• Incorporation of rights-based rationale for action, stressing equity and justice dimensions of chronic poverty and climate change adaptation in addition to instrumentalist rationale based primarily on economic efficiency.