Governing Natural Resources for Climate Resilient Development

Global warming is unequivocal. We have an urgent need to limit temperature rise below 2OC this century from pre-industrialized levels, and preferably below 1.5OC. This requires bringing down net GHG emissions to zero within the second half of the 21st century (Net Zero). The natural resources sector account for 24% of GHG (2010) emissions globally and it provides an important opportunity to the natural resource management (NRM) community to contribute to climate change mitigation. While mitigating the GHG emissions, the NRM sector also needs to prepare to adapt to climate change impacts. A range of NRM policies have been tried and tested across Asia in the past decade and four sets of actions appear prominently a) actions mitigate the negative impact on the efficacy of other policies, b) actions that buffer the economic impacts of climate change, c) actions that strengthen the health of the ecosystems, and d) actions that motivate environmentally educated choices by consumers and producers. This presentation provides a detailed treatise of these four sets of policy actions by taking specific examples, identifies pertinent issues, and identifies ways forward for governing natural resources.