ALM UNDP

Summary:

 The Kiribati Adaptation (Phase 2 Implementation) Project aims to develop and demonstrate the systematic diagnosis of climate-related problems and the design of cost-effective adaptation measures, while continuing to integrate climate risk awareness and responsiveness into economic and operational planning. The project has 5 broad components:

1. policy, planning, and information;
2. reducing the vulnerability of the coastline including key public assets and ecosystems
3. the development and management of freshwater resources;
4. providing technical assistance to build capacity at island and community level;
5. project management.

Kiribati is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change and sea level rise. Most of the land is less than 3 meters above sea level and on average only a few hundred meters wide, rendering retreat options untenable. The islands are exposed to periodic storm surges and to droughts, and are becoming increasingly vulnerable due to high population concentration, accelerated coastal development, and environmental degradation.

The 2000 World Bank Regional Economic Report estimated that by 2050 up to 25-54 ;percent of areas in Bikenibeu, South Tarawa and 55-80 percent of Buariki, North Tarawa, could become inundated. climate change ad sea level rise could also severely affect the main Tarawa groundwater lens, increase the epidemic potential for dengue fever, decrease agricultural productivity, and divert critical tuna resources from Kiribati waters. Moreover, climate change is threatening the marine ecosystems around Kiribati, in particular through impacts on the coral reefs surrounding the islands, with implications for subsistence and small-scale commercial near shore fisheries, failure of the reef to act as an effective buffer of wave energy, and increased island instability as sediment resources decline.

Overall, in the absence of adaption, Kiribati could face economic damages due to climate change and sea level rises of US 8-16 million a year by 2050, or 17-34 percent of its 1998 GDP. Along with other climate-related risks facing the country, Kiribati's ecosystems also experience extreme vulnerability, particularly of their plant, animal, soil and water resources, and their cultures as well as their traditional resource-use systems to outside human induced disturbance and over-exploitation. Given this, successful atoll development requires that the integrated aspects of the environment and social conditions, as well as external conditions- in relation to the stability of global economic systems- are taken into account.

The key objective is to develop and demonstrate the systematic diagnosis of climate-related problems and the design of cost-effective adaptation measures, while continuing the integration of climate risk awareness and responsiveness into economic and operational planning.

The global environmental objective is to assist in enhancing its capacity to plan and implement adaptation measures to the climate-related issues facing the country, which will all reduce the detrimental impacts of climate change on the fragile atoll ecosystems of Kiribati.