CSI Global Forum 2019 | Costa Rica

Overview

This resource was submitted by the Climate Risk Institute for use by the CanAdapt Climate Change Adaptation Community of Practice.

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This document provides an overview of the main results of the Global Forum of 2019 in Costa Rica. The Global Forum was a week of many fruitful discussions, exchanging experiences and learning from other participants’ best practices and lessons learned.

As a means to pilot the provision and use of Climate Services for infrastructure, the CSI project has at its heart the risk assessment pilots conducted in each of the countries using the PIEVC Protocol developed by Engineers Canada. While the methodology used is the same for all the countries, each country has found its own way of tweaking the Protocol to its specific needs. The pilots span a multitude of different infrastructure types in different stages of planning and the assessments serve a variety of purposes, from providing guidance for the development of terms of reference for infrastructure design to making a decision between retrofitting and rebuilding an existing infrastructure in different countries.

Among the main lessons learned was the importance not only of formalizing and clarifying roles and responsibilities for the assessment team early on in the process but also to harmonise and manage expectations for the assessment outcomes from the beginning to avoid unrealistic expectations. In terms of the potential for institutionalisation, a important insight was that existing processes and procedures should be analysed in order to see how best the PIEVC could potentially be linked to them but most importantly, that the institutionalisation of risk assessments in the planning process requires the timely and sustainable provision of Climate Services specifically suited to the risk assessment process in order to streamline future assessments and cut the cost and time necessary to obtain them.

The first opportunity to exchange on the PIEVC methodology in the context of the Global Forum was provided in the context of a risk assessment simulation at Guardia Bridge, the object of the pilot risk assessment in Costa Rica. During a market place as part of the afternoon session, all the country teams had the chance to more thoroughly explore the challenges, lessons learnt and vision for the assessment pilots in of Climate Services specifically suited to the risk assessment process in order to streamline future assessments and cut the cost and time necessary to obtain them.