世界银行-了解社会脆弱性以制定更有效的气候战略_南部和东部非洲气候变化综合报告的经验教训（英）-2025_85页_17mb

Understanding Social Vulnerability for More Effective Climate Strategies in Southern and Eastern Africa

This report highlights the critical interplay between climate change vulnerability and social factors such as poverty, inequality, and conflict in Southern and Eastern Africa. Climate hazards are severe across the region, but their impacts are significantly exacerbated by social vulnerability. Countries such as Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo face high exposure to climate risks, overlapping with high levels of multidimensional poverty, inequality, and exclusion, particularly affecting women, girls, youth, older adults, and Indigenous Peoples.

Key Insights

• Social Vulnerability Drives Disparities: The most vulnerable populations include those with limited access to resources, services, and decision-making power. Factors like race, ethnicity, gender, age, and disability shape vulnerability differently across communities.
• Complex Nexus with Conflict: Climate change interacts with conflict and violence, increasing migration, displacement, and humanitarian crises. For example, in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, climate disasters worsened existing conflicts that displaced over a million people.
• Gendered Impacts: Women and girls often bear disproportionate burdens from climate change and related issues like gender-based violence, constrained by limited land ownership, resource access, and decision-making power.
• Barriers to Climate Finance: Large-scale mitigation initiatives such as REDD+ and infrastructure projects can exacerbate existing vulnerabilities if communities are excluded, benefit-sharing is inequitable, or local participation is limited.
• Potential for Inclusive Action: Projects combining local empowerment with adaptation measures, such as Botswana’s Okavango Delta community initiatives or targeted post-disaster support in Cabo Delgado, demonstrate pathways toward resilient and inclusive climate action.

Recommendations for Action

1. Strengthen knowledge on social vulnerability through robust evidence, integrating qualitative and quantitative assessments.
2. Anchor climate policies in social vulnerability analyses, including stakeholder mapping and targeted interventions.
3. Pursue just transitions that minimize negative impacts on vulnerable groups, prioritize inclusion, and repair past inequities.
4. Elevate local communities’ roles in climate governance, ensuring access to finance and meaningful participation in decision-making.
5. Enhance social safety nets and equitable benefit-sharing in all climate initiatives to address exclusion and build adaptive capacity.

The urgency of addressing social vulnerability, particularly in the context of limited national capacities and high climate risks, underscores that effective climate action is fundamentally about reducing risks to the most marginalized while building inclusive resilience.