How early action through social protection builds climate resilience

Climate change is driving escalating economic and human losses, particularly in least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). For vulnerable countries, climate change erodes hard-won development gains, worsens food insecurity and pushes households deeper into poverty.

Early action through social protection offers one of the most effective ways to build climate resilience – protecting vulnerable households before disasters strike and reducing the cost of response.

Investment in social protection across low- and middle-income countries remains reactive, delivering support only after crisis strikes. Evidence shows that building resilience in advance is far more effective.

To address this challenge, IIED and partners developed the ASPIRE (Anticipatory Social Protection Index for Resilience) diagnostic tool, which assesses a country’s readiness to deliver early action through social protection across policies, systems, programmes and delivery mechanisms.

This online event will launch a landmark economic assessment across eight countries and 24 programmes, showing that early action through social protection delivers far better returns on investment than reactive humanitarian response.

Government partners will share how ASPIRE roadmaps are shaping proposals for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), while funders and partners discuss how to scale this approach and align national action with global processes, including the forthcoming International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate obligations.

About the speakers

• H.E. Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda (tbc)
• Mathilde Bord-Laurans, deputy executive director, Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD)
• Animesh Kumar, head, UNDRR office in Bonn
• Kunal Satyarthi, joint secretary, Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, India
• Abdihakim Ainte, director, food security and climate change, Prime Minister's Office, Somalia
• Ali Naseer Mohamed, ambassador and permanent representative, Maldives Mission to the United Nations (tbc)
• Madeleine Diouf Sarr, head, climate change division, Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, Senegal
• Sarah Coll-Black, senior social protection specialist, social protection and jobs global practice, World Bank
• Nasser Alkahtani, executive director, Arab Gulf Programme for Development (AGFUND) (tbc)
• Madeleine C. Thomson, head of climate impacts and adaptation, climate and health, Wellcome Trust

About attending

This event will be streamed via the Zoom video conferencing platform. For those who have not attended a Zoom event before, please read this guide to participation as an attendee. Every registrant will receive an email with a Zoom link ahead of the event.

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Photo: A rickshaw rides down a flooded street in Kolkata, India. (Credit: Photo by Dibakar Roy on Unsplash)