Linking Social Protection to Climate Change Adaptation

This story map touches on important questions on the role of social protection for climate change adaptation and sheds light on some key challenges, including around equity. It shares findings from a study by  CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security  team and includes three deep dives into social protection landscapes and programmes in India, Jordan and the Sahel region. Through a literature review, expert interviews and our three regional deep dives, we asked how practices on the ground are changing and how climate change is considered in the design of social protection programmes.

Social protection refers to any action, program or strategy that aims to address poverty and livelihood risks facing vulnerable groups.   

In short, it aims to: 

• Protect people against hardship and poverty 

• Prevent future hardship and poverty 

• Promote personal skills and income opportunities  

• Transform root causes of vulnerability to empower people 

 Looking at social protection globally, it's clear that access is uneven. Only 46.9 per cent of the global population are covered by one or more social protection benefits and in Africa, less than 17.4 per cent of the population in Africa is covered ( Aleksandrova et al., 2023 ). 

When we briefly zoom into our three regional deep dives, we can see that they vary in exposure to climate related risks. Besides having unique social protection landscapes, they also face very different socio-economic and political risks. 

Climate related risks are key threats to rural communities, which make up over two thirds of India’s population ( Godfrey-Wood & Flower 2018 ).

India’s public works social protection program, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) aims to address rural vulnerabilities. It is the largest social protection program in the world and can offer useful lessons in how large-scale national social protection schemes can be linked to climate change adaptation. It began as a rural development poverty alleviation program in 2005 that provided rural households an annual 100 days of unskilled manual work at minimum wage ( Godfrey-Wood & Flower 2018 ). 

The Sahel region already experiences many negative impacts of climate change. Most of the region’s countries rank as highly vulnerable and least prepared to face climate change risks. Regional instability and conflict are part of this.

Depite these challenges, social protection can provide livelihood opportunities. Mauritania is a good example, where the government has spent years investing in a national social protection system. Compared to its neighbours, their social protection system is relatively advanced.

Jordan hosts approximately 3.5 million international migrants (roughly a third of the total population), and approximately three quarters of a million refugees and asylum seekers. Around 650,000 of the refugees are Syrian, making Jordan the third-largest host country of Syrian refugees globally ( UNHCR, 2021 ), with Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalians, and Sudanese counted amongst other refugee nationalities. 

Zooming out, there are other national, regional and humanitarian social protection initiatives that show how climate change adaptation has been linked.

Lessons from other studies and our research show that we need to rethink social protection and climate change adaptation. Its useful to reconsider targeting and coverage and to adapt programme designs to meet new challenges and identify new funding opportunities ( Costella et al. 2023 ).

Our research noted a few key lessons for programme and policy, relating to five broad areas:

1. Scale and financing – expanding the currently low coverage of social protection in climate vulnerable countries, with a particular focus on women and children. This will require significant additional resources from domestic and bilateral aid budgets, multilateral and regional banks, and climate funds such as the Green Climate. 
2. Climate risk information – enhancing the use of climate risk information in the design of programmes and targeting of vulnerable populations, particularly through combining climate vulnerability assessments, the use of mapping tools, such as GIS, and data on socio-economic vulnerability, livelihoods and agroecological zones. 
3. Bundling of programmes – combining social welfare instruments and associated payouts with other programmes such as those for rural works, climate-smart agriculture and training and support. Social protection benefits, when bundled across programmes can go a long way in creating better outcomes. 
4. The transformative limits of public works programmes – prioritising the transformative, justice and empowerment objectives of adaptive social protection to address structural inequalities. These objectives are often sidelined or overlooked.
5. The limited evidence available of climate resilience impacts – expanding the knowledge base to cover existing gaps. Currently, little information is available on how linking social inclusion and climate resilience objectives actually changes livelihoods and agricultural and community practices. 
6. The urgent need for governance and policy coherence across programs - recognising that social protection alone is not enough and must be complemented with other adaptation measures. Creating robust governance systems to support this, is crucial.

References can be found in text. For more details on the CGIAR studies this storymap was based on:  

• Desai, B.; Meddings, G.; Campbell, R.; Laderach, P. (2023)  Adaptive social protection: a persistent illusion or the way forward for climate adaptation and social inclusion? . 

• Meddings, G.; Desai, B.; Jaskolski, M.; Schapendonk, F.; Läderach, P. (2023)  Barriers to developing social protection programs with adaptation considerations: The case of Jordan . 48 p. 

• Desai, B.; Meddings, G.; Laderach, P.; Campbell, R. (2023)  Reactive assistance or proactive protection? Social protection and climate resilience in the Sahel region . 35 p. 

• Campbell, R.; Desai, B.; Laderach, P. (2023)  Social protection as a stepping stone towards transformative climate resilience: the case of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Development Program (MGNREGA) .