Integrity Poll – Do you feel you’re doing enough to incorporate a climate lens in your work?

In the January issue of the Integrity Matters newsletter, we asked you about climate integration in your work. The majority of respondents (80%) thought they were not doing enough and could do more.

The IPCC report recently published outlined once again that our future is in peril, but also that it is up to us, not the climate, to change. The report clearly shows that both humans and nature are being pushed beyond their ability to adapt and that over 40% of the world’s population are already “highly vulnerable” to climate. It is now clearer than ever that we are running out of time and may not manage to adapt in time to avoid catastrophes.

“I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

This means that “climate resilient development” must be mainstreamed throughout all areas of our work. Whether our main focus is on health, livelihoods, infrastructure, or defence programme, we must ensure that we build the strength of every society to cope with climate change and its incoming devastating impacts.

At Integrity we strongly believe in the need to embed climate awareness in all of our programmes, and across our organisational practices. To this end, we:

• Work with clients to better understand how and why climate is important to their work and the context in which they implement their programmes.
• Believe evaluators have a clear role to play in mainstreaming climate and biodiversity considerations across the programme cycle. We have started to and will continue to play our part in embedding these crucial considerations in our work going forward. Recently this led us to document our reflections on how climate dimensions can be incorporated in global evaluation practises.
• Have exciting plans to develop a new framework for integrating climate and biodiversity in all things development… watch this space.