As climate change increasingly affects agriculture around the world, reliable, timely, and targeted information about weather and climate conditions is becoming an ever more urgent requirement for adaptation decision-making. This paper considers how transformative adaptation – long-term, systemic change to fundamental aspects of systems in response to or anticipation of severe climate change impacts - could be accelerated by enhancing climate services and how they are applied. The paper explores how components of climate services – defined as systems to develop and provide climate information to meet users’ needs - could be enhanced for building and implementing transformative pathways. It looks at current challenges and opportunities in climate service design and suggests how different types of information and data can be used to better integrate climate services into adaptation and development plans for systemic change. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and adaptation funding entities.

This report examines how climate change is impacting agriculture and threatening national and global food systems, particularly in climate hotspots, and how these trends are projected to intensify over the coming decades. The report defines and details transformative adaptation for agriculture and why such longer-term, systemic approaches are needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers and herders. Transformative adaptation in agriculture promotes long-term resilience by continually shifting the geographical locations where specific types of crops and livestock are produced, aligning agricultural production with changing landscapes and ecosystems, and/or introducing resilience-building production methods and technologies across value chains. The report presents evidence to support a call for urgent action by: Agricultural research organizations, to build and share knowledge regarding transformative approaches; Governments, to integrate this knowledge into plans and policies by establishing and implementing transformative pathways; and Funding entities, to increase financial support for agricultural adaptation and design sustainable financing mechanisms with the right incentives and disincentives to support transformative adaptation. Strategic investments in resilient food systems are crucial to manage intensifying climate change impacts and feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Planning for transformative adaptation should center on inclusive, participatory processes that engage a diverse range of stakeholders who may otherwise be marginalized in decision-making, such as women, youth and Indigenous peoples.

In India, poor and marginalized communities face the dual challenges of low socioeconomic development and extreme vulnerability to climate change. Although there have been significant improvements in India’s rural household electrification, electricity availability for health centers, schools, and rural enterprises is still limited. Decentralized solar energy solutions are increasingly considered for bringing reliable electricity to community facilities, especially in climate vulnerable areas.

Intensifying climate change impacts, such as more frequent, prolonged droughts, threaten to unravel the progress that Kenya has made advancing its sustainable development agenda and to stymie future gains. Like many policymakers around the world, Kenyan officials recognize that mainstreaming adaptation into their development plans and policies across all sectors can improve the resilience of development outcomes, maximize the efficiency of limited resources and help decision-makers avoid maladaptive investments. At the national level, Kenya has made considerable progress in building resilience through its National Adaptation Plan, and the government is now supporting local efforts to mainstream adaptation into County Integrated Development Plans (CIPDs) by establishing County Climate Change Funds (CCCFs). These innovative institutions provide the financial and technical assistance that county officials need to propose, prioritize and implement climate resilience actions. Analyzing progress made mainstreaming adaptation into five counties’ CIPDs, this working paper identifies two local governments that have emerged as early leaders: Makueni and Wajir. It examines the challenges that all counties have faced, highlights factors that have enabled Makueni and Wajir to overcome these barriers faster than the others and recommends strategies that can support efforts to integrate resilience into CIPDs across Kenya’s 47 counties. More specifically, it assesses the extent to which the CCCFs have accelerated both planning and implementation of mainstreamed adaptation actions as well as evaluates preliminary indications that the newly created projects are beginning to build resilience. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to mainstreaming, this paper underscores the important role that access to finance, robust stakeholder engagement and capacity building can play in advancing the implementation of climate-resilient, sustainable development initiatives around the world.

This paper is part of WRI’s Energy for Development Initiative, which integrates clean energy into strategies for improving development outcomes across the Indian states of Assam, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan. The paper provides an overview of national and state healthcare, education, and multisectoral policies to show how they address integration across sectors and reports stakeholder suggestions on integrating the planning requirements of development sectors with electricity.